i Pi ^ 

Ilil: ^ 
in 



x*^ °^.. 






.^^ ■r>. 



..■^' 






■^^ 



-■V 






-t. 






'>- v*- 









-s"^ "^ 



, -;\~ 



^^"^ '^- 



A^ 



^• 



c<- *- 



ic-*^ \ 



V' \\' 






■ ■> /.\^ * 






\V V^ 






,^ 




v; 








^ 






v*^ 


^^ 




""^A 






o 


o^ 


„ 








.:C^ % 



»^^ ^-^ 
,'?-• ^^. 



.V^ 

















N 




■* 8 


1 * 


-.' A"' 




.*\:. 













.^ 


■^^ 






*^' 








,!.'' 


■'O/' ^ 






> 


■i> 








> o 


■'^^ 


C 




z 








n 
* 


#' 





A HISTORY OF 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 



BY 
BARRETT WENDELL 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT HARVARD COLLEGE 
AND 

CHESTER NOYES GREENOUGH 

FORMERLY INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH AT HARVARD COLLEGE 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1907 






Copyright, 1904, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 




>A y 






PREFACE 

When it was proposed that Wendell's Literary History 
oj America should be reprinted in a school edition, it was 
clear to us that for such use the book needed thorough 
revision. Many passages, which properly found place in 
a book intended for general reading, involved expressions 
of opinion obviously unsuitable for schools. In prepar- 
ing this school version, our object has accordingly been 
to omit needless or debatable matter, but to preserve the 
general outline and all available portions of the original 
work. 

To aid us in our task, we submitted the Literary His- 
tory, chapter by chapter, to an advanced class of students 
at Harvard College, whom we encouraged to criticise it 
minutely in writing. The energy and good sense with 
which they did so have enabled us to correct many slight 
errors, and, at the same time, have strengthened our 
conviction that the earlier book was historically sound. 
We cannot too heartily acknowledge our debt to this 
critical collaboration of our pupils. 

B. W. 

C. N. G. 



GENERAL REFERENCES 



(A) English History 

S. R. Gardiner, A Siiidc-iifs History of England, London and New 
York: Longmans, 1900. 



(B) English Literature 

Stopford Brooke, Primer of English Literature, New York: Mac- 

millan, 1889. 
Henry Craik, English Prose, 5 vols., New York: Macmillan, 1893- 

1896. 
Frederick Ryland, Chronological Outlines of English Literature, 

New York: Macmillan, 1896. 
T. H. Ward, English Poets, 4 vols., New York: Macmillan, 1896- 

1900. 

(C) American History 

Edward Channing, A Student's History of the United States, New 

York : Macmillan, 1899. 
Edward Channing and A. B. Hart, Guide to the Study of American 

LListory, Boston : Ginn, i8g6. Indispensable. 
A. B. Hart, Formation of the Union, 1750-1829, New York: Long- 
mans, 1897. 
R. G. Thwaites, The Colonies, 1492-1750, New York: Longmans, 

1897. 
WOODROW Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1829-1889, New York; 

Longmans, 1898. 
Justin Winsor, A^arrative and Critical History of America, 8 vols., 

Boston: Houghton, 1886-1889. Indispensable for the advanced 

student. Not a consecutive history. 



viii General References 



(D) American Literature 
I. Literary Histories 

W. C. Bronson, a Short History of American Literature, Boston: 
Heath, 1902. 

John NiCHOl., American Literature, Edinburgh: Black, 1882. 

H. S. Pancoast, Introduction to American I^iterature, New York : 
Holt, 1898. 

C. F. Richardson, American Literature, 2 vols.. New York: Put- 
nam, 1887. 

W. P. Trent, A History of American Literature, New York: Apple- 
ton, 1903. 

E. C. Stedman, Poets of Afnerica, Boston: Houghton, 1885. 

M. C. Tyler, A History of American Literature during ilie Colonial 
Time, 2 vols.. New York: Putnam, 1897. 

M. C. Tyi.er, llie Literary Historv of the American Revolution, 2 
vols., New York : Putnam, 1897. 



2. Collections of Extracts 

G. R. Carpenter, American Prose, _]>{^w York: Macmillan, 1903. 

E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck;,' Cyclopcedia of Americati Literature, 2 
vols.. New York, 1855. "• 

R. W. Griswold, The Poets and Poetry erf America, Philadelphia, 
1842. 

R. W. Griswold, Prose Waiters of America, Philadelphia, 1847. 

A. B. Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, 4 vols., New 
York: Macmillan, 1897-1901. Particularly useful for the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries. 

E. C. Stedman, An American Anthology, Boston : Houghton, 1900. 
Very good ; excellent short biographies. 

E. C. Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson, Library of American Liter- 
ature, II vols.. New York, 1888-1890. The best collection of its 
kind. The indexes and biographies are very well made. 



3 . Bibliograph ies 

P. K. Foley, American Aut/iors [i 795-1895] ; a Bibliography of First 
and Abatable Editions chronologically arranged, with Notes. Boston: 
Privately printed, l897« 



General References ix 

Joseph Sabin, Bidliot/ura Americana ; a Dictionary of Books relating 
to America, 20 vols., New York : Sabin, 1858-1892. 

S. L. Whitcomb, Chronological Outlines of American Literature, New 
York : Macmillan, 1894. Very useful. 

In the reference lists at the beginnings of chapters, the following 
abbreviations are used: "AML" for the " American Men of Letters'' 
series; "AS" for the "American Statesmen" series; " BB " for the 
"Beacon Biographies ";" EML '' for the "English Men of Letters" 
series ; " GW " for the " Great Writers " series. 

Asterisks indicate the best editions and most useful sources of infor 
mation. 



CONTENTS 



BOOK I 

The Seventeenth Century 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. English History from 1600 to 1700 11 

II. English Literature from 1600 to 1700 18 

III. American History from 1600 to 1700 23 

IV. Literature in America from 1600 to 1700 . . , -31 
V. Cotton Mather 42 

VI. Summary 50 



BOOK II 



The Eighteenth Century 



I. English History from 1700 to 1800 

II. English Literature from 1700 to 1800 

III. American History from 1700 to 1800 

IV. Literature in America from 1700 to 1776 
V. Jonathan Edwards 

VI. Benjamin Franklin ..... 

VII. The American Revolution 

VIII. Literature in America from 1776 to 1800 

IX. Summary 



53 
55 
69 

71 
77 

83 
92 



xii Contents 



BOOK III 

The Nineteenth Century 

THAPTER PAGE 

I. English History from 1800 to 1900 113 

II. English Literature from 1800 to 1900 118 

III. American History from 1800 to 1900 121 

IV. Literature in America from 1800 to 1900 . . . .125 



BOOK IV 

Literature in the Middle States from 1798 to 1857 

I. Charles Brockden Brown 129 

II. Washington Irving 136 

III. James Fenimore Cooper 148 

IV. William Cullen Bryant . .158 

V. Edgar Allan Poe 169 

VI. The Knickerbocker School 179 



BOOK V 

The Renaissance of New England 

I. Some General Characteristics of New England . . 189 

II. The New England Orators 201 

III. The New England Scholars and Historians . . .210 

IV. Unitarianism 229 

V. Transcendentalism 239 

VI. Ralph Waldo Emerson 254 

VII. The Lesser Men of Concord 266 



Contents xiii 

CHAPTER PACE 

VIII. The Antislavery Movement 275 

IX. John Greenleaf Whittier , . . 289 

X. The Atlantic Monthly 298 

XI. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 305 

XII. James Russell Lowell 315 

XIII. Oliver Wendell Holmes 327 

XIV. Nathaniel Hawthorne 340 



BOOK VI 

The Rest of the Story 

I. New York Since 1857 355 

II. Walt Whitman 371 

III. Later New England 379 

IV. The Novel: Ho wells, James, and Crawford . . . 395 
V. The South 399 

VI. The West 412 

VII. Mark Twain 421 

VIII. Conclusion 425 

Index 437 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PACE 



John Winthrop 26 

Samuel Sewall 28 

Cotton Mather 45 

Jonathan Edwards 78 

Benjamin Franklin 84 

Timothy Dwight 102 

Joel Barlow 106 

Charles Brockden Brown 130 

Washington Irving 138 

Sunnyside, Irving's Home at Tarrytown ..... 139 

James Fenimore Cooper 150 

William CuUen Bryant 160 

Edgar Allan Poe . 170 

Nathaniel Parker Willis 182 

Daniel Webster 204 

Edward Everett 206 

George Ticknor 216 

William Hickling Prescott 221 

Francis Parkman 226 

William ElJery Channing 234 

Margaret Fuller 247 

Brook Farm 249 

George Ripley 252 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 258 



xvi IJ.st of Uhistrdtions 



PAGE 



Amos Bronson Alcott 267 

Henry David Thoreau ........ o . 269 

William Lloyd Garrison . 278 

Harriet Beecher Stowe 284 

John Greenleaf Whittier 291 

James Thomas Fields 302 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 306 

Longfellow's Home, Craigie House, Cambridge .... 308 

Longfellow in his Library 312 

James Russell Lowell . 317 

Elmwood, Cambridge, Mass., Birthplace of James Russell 

Lowell 318 

Oliver Wendell Holmes 328 

Holmes's Birthplace, Cambridge 329 

Commencement Day at Harvard in Holmes's Time . . -331 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 342 

An Early Home of Hawthorne, Old Manse, Concord . . . 343 
Wayside, Concord, Home of Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . 347 

Walt Whitman 373 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens 422 



A HISTORY OF 
LITERATURE IN AMERICA 



INTRODUCTION 

Literature, the lasting expression in words of the 
meaning of Hfe, is of all fine arts the most national : each Literature 
language grows to associate with itself the ideals and the '" ^^i^'*'- 
aspirations and the fates of those peoples with whose life 
it is inextricably intermingled. 

Languages grow and live and die in accordance with 
laws of their own. This English of ours may be taken as 
typical. Originating from the union and confusion of 
older tongues, it has struggled through the infantile diseases 
of dialect, each of which has left some trace, until long ago 
it not only had become the sole means of expression for 
millions of people, but also had assumed the form which 
now makes its literature in some respects the most remark- 
able of modern times. Whatever else it may be, this Ht- 
erature is the most spontaneous, the least formal and con- 
scious, the most instinctively creative, the most free from 
excess of culture, and so, seemingly, the most normal. Its 
earliest forms were artless; songs and sayings began to 
stray from oral tradition into written record, laws were 
sometimes phrased and chronicles made in the robust 
young terms which carried meaning to unlearned folk as 
well as to those versed in more polite tongues, such as 
French or Latin. Presently came forms of literature 
which, at least comparatively, were artistic. The earliest 
of these which has lasted in general literary memory 
reached its height in the works of Chaucer (about 1340- 



2 Introduction 

1400). After his time came a century or more of civil 
disturbance, when Enghshmen were too busy with wars of 
the Roses and the hke for further progress in the arts of 
peace. Then, with the new national integrity which grew 
under the Tudors, came a stronger literary impulse, un- 
surpassed in vigorous spontaneity. 

In 1575 there was hardly such a thing as modern Eng- 
lish literature; in 1625 that great body of English litera- 
ture which we call Elizabethan was complete. Fifty 
years had given us not only incomparable lyric verse and 
the final version of the Enghsh Bible (161 1), but the works 
too of Spenser (i 552-1 599), of Shakspere (i 564-1616) and 
the other great dramatists, of Hooker (i 553-1600), of 
Ralegh (1552-1618), of Bacon (1561-1626), and of all 
their fellows. Among these, of course, Shakspere stands 
supreme, just as Chaucer stood among his contempo- 
raries, whose names are now forgotten by all but special 
scholars; and one feature of Shakspere's supremacy is 
that his literary career was normal. Whoever has followed 
it from his experimental beginning, through the ripeness 
to which he brought comedy, history, and tragedy alike, 
to its placid close amid the decadent formality of another 
established literary tradition, will have learned something 
more than even the great name of Shakspere includes, — 
he will have had a glimpse of the natural law which not 
only governed the course of Shakspere himself and of 
Elizabethan literature, but has always governed the 
growth, development, and decline of all literature and of 
PheLawof all fine art. Lasting literature has its birth when a crea- 
tive impulse, which we may call imaginative, moves men 
to break the shackles of tradition, making things which 
have not been before; sooner or later this impulse is 



Literary 
Evolution. 



Introduction 3 

checked by a growing sense of the inexorable limits of 
fact and of language ; and then creative imagination sinks 
into some new tradition, to be broken only when, in time 
to come, the vital force of imagination shall revive. 

As English literature has grown into maturity, the con- 
stant working of this law has become evident. The first 
impulse, we have seen, gave us the work of Chaucer; the 
second, which came only after generations, gave us the 
Elizabethan lyrics and dramas, Spenser and Shakspere, 
and the final form of the English Bible. This last, prob- 
ably the greatest masterpiece of translation in the world, 
has exercised on the thought and the language of English- 
speaking people an influence which cannot be overesti- 
mated. As a translation, however, it rather indicates how 
eager Elizabethan Englishmen were to know the splendors 
of world-old literature, than reveals a spontaneous impulse 
towards native expression. Apart from this supreme 
work, the fully developed literature of the Elizabethan 
period took on the whole the form of poetry; that of the 
eighteenth century, on the other hand, took on the whole 
the form of prose; and as English prose literature has 
developed, no phase of it has developed more highly than 
its fiction. This general statement is perhaps enough to 
indicate an important tendency. The first form in which 
any normal literature develops is instinctively poetic; prose 
comes later; and prose fiction, that intricate combination 
of poetic impulse with prosaic form, comes later still. In 
1625 English literature was fully developed only in the 
forms of lyric and dramatic poetry. 

It was about this time that America came into existence. America 
It began with a number of mutually independent settle- 
ments, each of which grew into something like politica.1 



Defined. 



4 Introduction 

integrity. When the Constitution of the United States 
was adopted, the sentiment of local sovereignty in the sepa- 
rate States was accordingly too strong to allow the federal 
power to assume an independent name. As the power thus 
founded developed into one of the most considerable in 
modern history, its citizens found themselves driven by this 
fact of national namelessness to a custom which is often 
held presumptuous; they called themselves Americans, 
a name geographically proper to all natives of the Western 
Hemisphere, from Canada to Patagonia. By this time 
the custom thus established has given to the name "Amer- 
ica" the sense in which we generally use it. The America 
with whose literary history we are to be concerned is only 
that part of our continent which is dominated by the Eng- 
lish-speaking people now subject to the government of the 
United States. 

A literary history of America should therefore concern 
itself with such lasting expressions in words of the mean- 
ing of life as this people has uttered during its three cen- 
turies of existence; or, in simpler terms, with what 
America has contributed to the literature of the English 
language. 

In the history of America each century has traits of its 
own. In 1600 there was no such thing as English-speak- 
ing America; in 1700 all but one of the colonies which 
have developed into the United States were finally estab- 
lished, and the English conquest of the middle colonies 
founded by the Dutch or the Swedes was virtually com- 
plete. In 1700 every one of the American colonies was 
loyally subject to the government of King William III; 
in 1800 there remained throughout them no vestige of 
British authority. In 1800, the last complete year of the 



Introduction 5 

presidency of John Adams, the United States were still an 
experiment in government, of which the result remained 
in doubt; the year 1900 found them a power which seems 
as established and as important as any in the world. 
Clearly these three centuries of American history are at 
least as distinct as three generations in any race. 

Again, the typical American character of the seventeenth The 
century differed from that of the eighteenth, and that of "[yp"^^' 

■^ o ' American. 

the eighteenth from that of the nineteenth, as distinctly 
as the historical limits of these centuries differed one from 
the other. In the seventeenth century the typical Ameri- 
can, a man of English-speaking race, seemed to himself an 
immigrant hardly at home in the remote regions where his 
exiled life was to be passed. In the eighteenth century 
the typical American, still English at heart, was so far in 
descent from the immigration that almost unawares his 
personal ties with the mother country had been broken. 
In the nineteenth century the typical American, politically 
as well as personally independent of the old world, and 
English only so far as the traditions inseparable from an- 
cestral law and language must keep him so, has often felt 
or fancied himself less at one with contemporary Eng- 
lishmen than with Europeans of other and essentially 
foreign blood. 

Yet we Americans are English-speaking still; the ideals The ideals 
which underlie our conscious life must always be the "^ ^^^ht 

'' and of 

ideals which underlie the conscious life of the mother Rights, 
country. Morally and religiously these ideals are im- 
mortally consecrated in King James's version of the 
Bible; legally and politically they are grouped in the Com- 
mon Law of England. Morally, these ideals are com- 
prised in a profound conviction that we are bound to do 



6 Introduction 

right; legally they may be summarized in the statement 
that we are bound to maintain our rights. But the rights 
contemplated by our ancestral law are not vague things, 
which people imagine, on general principles, that they 
ought to have; they are privileges and practices which 
custom and experience have proved favorable to the wel- 
fare of people like ourselves. 
The Three Recurring to our division of native Americans into the 
of^Lite"a- three types which correspond with the three centuries of 
ture in American history, we perceive that only the last, the Ameri- 

America. . 

cans of the nineteenth century, have produced literature of 
any importance. The greater part of our study must con- 
sequently concern the century lately at an end. For all 
that, the two earlier centuries were not sterile ; rather indeed 
the amount of native American writing which each pro- 
duced is surprising. What is more, American writings 
of the eighteenth century differed from those of the seven- 
teenth quite as distinctly as did American history or Ameri- 
can character. Of both centuries, meanwhile, two things 
are true: neither in itself presents much literary variety, 
and most of what was published in each has already been 
forgotten. Our task, accordingly, is to glance at the liter- 
ary history of America during the seventeenth century and 
the eighteenth, and to study that literary history during 
the past hundred years. 

Taking each century in turn, we may conveniently begin 
by reminding ourselves briefly of what it contributed to the 
history and to the literature of England. With this in 
mind we may better understand a similar but more minute 
study of America during each of the three periods in ques- 
tion. When we come to the last and most important of 
these, the nineteenth century, we may find ourselves a 



Introduction 7 

little troubled by the fact that so much of it is almost con- 
temporary with ourselves. Contemporary hfe is never 
quite ripe for history; facts cannot at once range them- 
selves in true perspective; and when these facts are living 
men and women, there is a touch of inhumanity in writing 
of them as if we had already had the misfortune to lose 
them. Yet write of them we must, with what approach 
to certainty contemporary judgment may make, in order 
that by carrying our record through the year 1900 we may 
try to discern what America has so far contributed to the 
literature of our ancestral EngHsh language. 



BOOK I 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK I 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

I 

ENGLISH HISTORY FROM IGOO TO 1700 

References 

Gardiner, Chapters xxx-xliii. A list of books for further study of this 
period is given by Gardiner, p. 577; for our purposes, however, Gardi- 
ner's own chapters are sufficient. 

In 1600 the reign of Queen Elizabeth (i 558-1603)* was TheSover- 
drawing to its close. After her came the pragmatic Scotch- *'^°^' 
man, James I (1603-1625). After him came Charles I 
(1625-1649), whose tragic fate has combined with the 
charm of his portraits to make him at least a pathetically 
romantic hero. Then came Cromwell (1649-1658), as 
sternly sovereign in his fleeting Commonwealth as ever 
king was in monarchy. Then came Charles II (1660- 
1685) with all the license of the Restoration; then 
James II (1685-1689), displaced by the revolution which 
broke out in 1688; finally (1689-1702) came the Dutch 
Prince of Orange with his English Queen, Mary (1689- 
1694). Seven sovereigns in all we find, if we count Will- 
iam and Mary together; and of these only six were royal. 
Of the six royalties, four were Stuarts, who came in the 

* The dates after the names of sovereigns indicate the limits not of 
their lives but of their reigns. 



12 



The Seventeenth Century 



Cromwell. 



Puritan- 
ism. 



middle of the list; and the Stuart dynasty was broken 
midway by Cromwell, the one EngHsh sovereign not royal. 

Literally, then, Cromwell is the central figure of English 
history during the seventeenth century. Love him or 
hate him, reverence or detest his memory, one fact you 
must grant r never before in English history had men seen 
dominant the type of which he is the great representative; 
never since his time have they again seen that dominant 
type, now vanished with the world which brought it forth, 
— the type of the dominant Puritan. 

The Puritan character, of course, is too permanently 
English to be confined to any single period of English 
history. In the seventeenth century, however, Puritanism 
for a while acquired the unique importance of national 
dominance, which it proved politically unable to maintain 
beyond the lifetime of its chief exponent. A religious sys- 
tem, one generally thinks it; and rightly, for it was pro- 
foundly actuated by conscious religious motives, and by 
passionate devotion to that system of Christian theology 
which is known as Calvinism. A poHtical movement, too, 
it often seems; and rightly, for never in the course of Eng- 
Hsh history have native Englishmen so striven to alter the 
form and the course of constitutional development. In 
such a study as ours it has both aspects; the dominance of 
Puritanism may best be thought of as the period when for 
a little while the moral and religious ideals which underlie 
our language were uppermost, when for once the actuating 
impulse of authority was rather that the will of God should 
be done on earth than that any custom — however fortified 
and confirmed by the experience formulated in the Com- 
mon Law — should for its own sake be maintained. 

That the will of God should be done, on earth as it is in 



English Historij — 1600 to 1700 13 

Heaven, no good man will ever deny. What the will of 
God is, on the other hand, when directly concerned with 
the matters of this world, even good Englishmen cannot 
always agree. Among the Puritans themselves there was 
plenty of dissension, but one thing seems fairly sure, — no 
good Puritan questioned the truth of Calvinism. To un- 
derstand Puritanism, in England and in America alike, 
we must therefore remind ourselves of what Calvinistic 
theology taught. 

In the beginning, the Puritans held, God created man, 
responsible to Him, with perfect freedom of will. Adam, 
in the fall, exerted his will in opposition to the will of God ; 
thereby Adam and all his posterity merited eternal punish- Calvinism, 
ment. As a mark of that punishment they lost the power 
of exerting their will in harmony with the will of God, 
without losing their hereditary responsibility to Him. But 
God, in His infinite mercy, was pleased to mitigate His 
justice. Through the mediation of Christ, certain human 
beings, chosen at God's pleasure, might be relieved of the 
just penalty of sin, and received into everlasting salvation. 
These were the elect; none others could be saved, nor could 
any acts of the elect impair their salvation. Now, there 
were no outward and visible marks by which the elect 
might be known; there was a fair chance that any human 
being to whom the gospel was brought might be of the 
number. The thing which most vitally concerned every 
man was accordingly to discover whether he were elect, 
and so free from the just penalty of sin. The test of elec- 
tion was ability to exert the will in true harmony with the 
will of God; whoever could willingly do right had a 
fair ground for hope that he should be saved. But even 
the elect were infected with the hereditary sin of humanity; 



14 The Seventeenth Century 

and, besides, no wile of the Devil was more frequent than 
that which deceived men into believing themselves regen- 
erated when in truth they were not. The task of assuring 
one's self of election could end only with life, — a life of 
passionate aspirations, ecstatic enthusiasms, profound 
discouragements. Above all, men must never forget that 
the true will of God was revealed, directly or by imphca- 
tion, only and wholly in Scripture; incessant study of Scrip- 
ture was the sole means by which any man could assure 
himself that his will was really exerting itself, through the 
mediatory power of Christ, in true harmony with the will 
of God. 
Calvinism Calviuism this creed is commonly called, in memory of 
Evoiu- John Calvin (i 509-1 564), the French reformer, who has 
tion. been its chief modern exponent; but perhaps we might 

better call it the system of Saint Augustine. Both Augus- 
tine and Calvin are remembered chiefly, perhaps wholly, as 
theologians, and seem intangibly remote from the workaday 
life of this age, whose most characteristic energies are de- 
voted to scientific research. Yet, strangely enough, the 
conceptions which underhe the most popular scientific 
philosophy of our own time have much in common with 
those which actuated both Augustine and Calvin. Earthly 
life, the modern evolutionists hold, consists in a struggle for 
existence wherein only the fittest can survive. In the days 
when Calvin pondered on the eternities, and still more in 
those tragic days of toppling empire when Augustine strove 
to imprison divine truth within the hmits of earthly lan- 
guage, science was still to come. But what Augustine and 
Calvin saw, in the human affairs whence each inferred the 
systems of Heaven and Hell, was really what the modern 
evolutionists perceive in every aspect of Nature. Total 



English History — 1600 to 1700 15 

depravity is only a theological name for that phase of life 
which moderns name the struggle for existence; and Hke- 
wise election is only a theological name for what our newer 
fashion calls the survival of the fittest. 

Now, any struggle is bound to be at its fiercest where 
the struggling forces are most concentrated. In human 
affairs, both good and evil struggle hardest where human 
beings are most densely congregated. Augustine wrote 
in a world still formally dominated by that imperial power 
of Rome whose health and strength were gone. Calvin 
wrote in the populous Europe of the Renaissance, where 
the whole system of mediaeval life was doomed, and where 
the pressure of economic fact was already forcing the more 
adventurous spirits of every European race to explore our 
Western Hemisphere. Noble, too, though we may find 
the traditions of that merry old England, which was so 
vital under Queen Elizabeth, which faded under the first 
two Stuarts, and which vanished in the smoke of the Civil 
Wars, the plain records, both of history and of literature, 
show it to have been a dense, wicked old world, whose 
passions ran high and deep, and whose vices and crimes, 
big as its brave old virtues, were such as to make the grim 
dogmas of the Puritans seem to many earnest minds the 
only explanation of so godless a fact as human life. 

God's will be done on earth, then, the Puritans cried, Puritan 
honestly conceiving this divine w^ill to demand the political ^^^^^' 
dominance of God's elect. The society over which they 
believed that these elect should make themselves politically 
dominant had all the complexity which must develop itself 
during centuries of national and social growth; and this 
growth, fortified by the unwritten Common Law of Eng- 
land, had taken through the centuries an earthly course at 



16 The Seventeenth Century 

variance with what the Puritans held to be their divinely 
sanctioned politics. Towards the end of Cromwell's 
dominance they tried to mend matters by giving England 
a written constitution. In many respects this Instru- 
ment of Government seems theoretically better than 
the older system which had grown under the unwritten 
Common Law, and which since Cromwell's time has de- 
veloped into the Parliamentary government now control- 
ling the British Empire. The Instrument of Government, 
however, had a mortal weakness: it was not historically 
continuous with the past ; and this was enough to prevent 
any historical continuity with the future. The struggle 
for political existence in England was inevitably fatal to 
principles and ideals so little rooted in national life as those 
which the Puritans formulated. So in England, after the 
momentary irruption of dominant Puritanism, the old 
Common Law surged back; and it has flowed on to the 
present day, the stronger if not the nobler of the two ideals 
of our race. 

The records which remain to us of Elizabethan England, 
and of the England which finally broke into civil war, seem 
to concern men of a remote past. Take, for example, 
The the adventurer, Ralegh; the soldier and courtier, Essex; 

Nau^nai° ^^^^ ^ WhIq later, that most chivalrous of autobiographers. 
Temper. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. All three are marked by a 
big, simple, youthful spontaneity. Take, equally at ran- 
dom, three other names which belong to the years after 
Cromwell's dominant Puritanism had failed: Samuel 
Pepys, the diarist; Halifax, the great Trimmer; and John 
Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Though by no 
means contemporary with ourselves, these seem, in com- 
parison with the elder group, almost modern, — old-fash- 



English History — lUOO to 1700 17 

ioned men rather than men of an earlier type than those 
we Hve with. The contrast is typical. The England 
which came before Cromwell, the England which we may 
name "Elizabethan," vanished when Puritan dominance 
broke for a while the progress of English constitutional 
law; the England which came afterwards, whatever its 
merits or its faults, lacked, as England has continued to 
lack ever since the Restoration, certain traits which we 
all feel in the old Elizabethan world. 

For our purpose there is hardly anything more important 
than to realize, if we can, what these Elizabethan traits Three 
were, which distinguish the England before Cromwell's bithan 
time from that which has come after him. Perhaps we Traits, 
shall have done a little to remind ourselves of what Eliza- 
bethan England possessed, when we begin to feel how 
throughout that older time we find three characteristics 
which in later days are more and more rare, — spontaneity, 
enthusiasm, and versatility. 



II 

ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1700 

References 

For this chapter, as for the others on English hterary history, the gen- 
eral authorities (see p. vii) are sufficient. Whoever wishes more about 
this period may consult George Saintsbury's History of Elizabethan Liter- 
ature, London: Macmillan, 1887, and A. W. Ward's History of English 
Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, 3 vols., London: Mac- 
millan, 1899. 

The Three The social history of seventeenth-century England 
groups itself in three parts : that which preceded the domi- 
nant Puritanism of the Commonwealth; the dominant Puri- 
tanism itself; and what came after. All three of these 
phases of English life found expression in literature. Be- 
tween 1600 and 1605 appeared plays by Dekker, Ben Jon- 
son, John Lyly, Shakspere, Marston, Middleton, Hey- 
wood, and Chapman; Florio's translation of Montaigne; 
Campion's Art of English Poetry; and, among many other 
lesser works, the last volume of Hakluyt's Voyages. Be- 
tween 1648 and 1652 appeared works by Fuller, Herrick, 
Lovelace, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Bunyan, Izaak 
Walton, and George Herbert. Finally, between 1695 
and 1700 appeared plays by Congreve, Farquhar, and 
Vanbrugh; and works of one sort or another by Bentley, 
Defoe, Evelyn, Lord Shaftesbury, and Dryden; not to 
speak of Tate and Brady's version of the Psalms. These 
random lists will suggest the outline of the literary history 
we need to keep in mind. 

18 



English Literature— 1600 to 1700 19 

The beginning of the century marked the height of 
Elizabethan hterature, in which the central figure is Shak- 
spere. Among the men who were writing in the middle 
of the century, men in whom the Elizabethan spirit was 
no longer strong, one rose almost as superior to the rest 
as Shakspere had been fifty years before. That one, 
of course, is Milton (1608-1674). In the last five years 
of the century, there was another group, as different from 
either of the others as were the periwigs of Marlborough 
from the jewelled caps of Sir Walter Ralegh; and in this 
last group, as in the others, one figure emerges from the 
rest. Here that figure is John Dryden (1631-1700), the 
first great maker of heroic couplets, and the first masterly 
writer of such English prose as we now feel to be modern. 
It is worth our while to glance in turn at each of these 
hterary periods, — the periods of Shakspere, of Milton, 
and of Dryden. 

Elizabethan literature, in which Shakspere now ap- The Pe 
pears supreme, is at once the first, and in many respects 
the greatest, of the schools or periods of letters which con- spere 
stitute modern English hterature. Marked throughout 
by spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility, this period is 
clearly marked as well by the fact that it brought to final 
excellence two kinds of poetry, — the lyric, and a httle later 
the dramatic. In thinking of Elizabethan literature, one 
is accordingly apt to forget that it includes noble prose as 
well. Yet no reader of English can long forget that to this 
same period belong the scientific work and the later 
essays of Bacon. It was within the first fifteen years of 
the seventeenth century, too, that Ralegh, in the Tower, 
was writing his History 0} the World; and that various mas- 
terly translations were accompanying the growth of that 



riod of 
Shak- 



20 The Seventeenth Century 

final masterpiece of translation, the English Bible of 1611. 
Meanwhile there were minor phases of literature: the 
name of Hakluyt, the collector of so many records of ex- 
ploration, is still familiar; so is that of Richard Hooker, 
whose Ecclesiastical Polity remains the chief monument 
of religious controversy in the reign of Elizabeth. Poetry 
was first, then, and supreme, but there was sonorous and 
thoughtful prose in philosophy and history alike; much 
matter of contemporary chronicle, such as Hakluyt's 
Voyages; and much controversial writing. 

Throughout this hterature there is one trait which the 
lapse of three centuries has tended to obscure. This is a 
sort of pristine alertness of mind, evident in innumerable 
details of Elizabethan style. One may best detect it, 
perhaps, by committing to memory random passages from 
Elizabethan plays. If the trait occurred only in the 
work of Shakspere, one might deem it a mere fresh miracle 
of his genius; but it occurs everywhere. Such literature 
as the Elizabethan world has left us bears witness through- 
out that the public for which it was made was quick of wit, 
and eager to enjoy a wide variety of literary effects. 
The Pe- By the middle of the century, this trait had begun to 

fade out of English letters. Our brief list of mid-century 
publications revealed Milton, not as the chief of a school, 
but rather as the one great figure in a group of fastidi- 
ously careful minor poets and elaborate makers of over- 
wrought rhetorical prose, often splendid but never simple. 
Fuller, Taylor, and Walton fairly typify seventeenth-cen- 
tury prose; to complete our impression of it we might 
glance at Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and 
at Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1642). One 
term by which we may characterize this mid-century Eng- 



riod of 
Milton 



English Literature— 1600 to 1700 21 

lish literature, to distinguish it from what came before, is 
the term "dehberate." Mysteriously but certainly the 
spontaneity and versatility of Elizabethan days had dis- 
appeared. The Hterature of Cromwell's England was as 
different from that of Elizabeth's as Cromwell was from 
Walter Ralegh. The names of Shakspere and Milton 
tell the story. 

The name of Dryden is as different from that of Milton The Pe- 
as Milton's is from Shakspere's. Though Dryden's Sryden. 
A strata Redux was published in i66o, seven years before 
Paradise Lost, Dryden died in 1700 amid a hterature whose 
poetry had cooled into something like the rational form 
which deadened it throughout the century to come, and 
whose drama had for forty years been revealing new 
phases of decadence. But if poetry and the drama 
were for the moment sleeping, there were other kinds of 
English thought, if not of English feeling, which were full 
of life. Boyle (1627-1691) had done his work in chem- 
istry; Newton (1642-1727) had created a whole realm of 
physical science; Locke (1632-1704) had produced his 
epoch-making Essay concerning Humane Understanding 
(1690); and, to go no further, the works of Sir William 
Temple (1628-1699) and the critical essays of Dryden 
himself had given English prose almost its final form. 

In Hterature, just as in history, we find, the seventeenth 
century reveals three distinct English epochs, each dif- 
ferent from the others and all together involving such 
changes in the national temperament as to make the The 
England of Dryden almost as foreign to that of Shak- National 
spere as the temper of King William III was to Queen Temper. 
Elizabeth's. Like Elizabethan England, Elizabethan 
literature seems different from anything which we can 



22 The Seventeenth Century 

now know in the flesh. One can hardly imagine feeling 
quite at home in the Mermaid Tavern with Beaumont 
and Ben Jonson and the rest; but in modern London, 
or at least in the London of thirty years ago, one might 
sometimes feel that a few steps around a grimy corner 
should still lead to some coffee-house, where glorious John 
Dryden could be found sitting in robust, old-fashioned 
dictatorship over the laws of the language in which we 
ourselves think and speak and feel. For Dryden's Eng- 
land is not yet quite dead and gone. But dead and gone,, 
or at least vanished from this earth, in Dryden's time 
almost as surely as in ours, was the spontaneous, enthu- 
siastic, and versatile old England of Elizabeth. 

History and literature alike, in short, show us an Eng- 
land of the seventeenth century wherein the great central 
convulsion of dominant Puritanism fatally destroyed a 
youthful world, and gave us in its place a more deliberate, 
permanently different new one. 



Ill 

AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 1600 TO 1700 

References 

General Authorities: Excellent short accounts are Channing, Slu- 
dent's History, 57-128; Thwaites, Colonies, Chapters iii-x, especially 
iii (outlining in general the English policy of colonization and discussing 
the religious position of the English emigrants), vi (on New England, 
1620-1643), and viii (on social and economic conditions in New Eng- 
land in 1700). 

Special Works: The authorities mentioned in the brief bibliogra- 
phies at the beginnings of chapters in the books mentioned above, and, 
for minute study, the works referred to in the larger bibliographies 
named below. 

Bibliographies: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 92-130; Winsor's 
America, III-V. 

It was in the first quarter of this seventeenth century 
that the American colonies were finally established. The 
first lasting settlement in Virginia was made in the spring 
of 1607; the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth towards the coioniza- 
endofi62o; Boston was founded less than ten years later; ^'°"" 
and from 1636 dates the oldest of native American cor- 
porations, that of Harvard College. At the latest of these 
dates, which are less than a full generation apart, the tragic 
reign of Charles I was not half finished; at the earliest, 
Queen Elizabeth had lain less than five years in West- 
minster Abbey. 

From these facts may be inferred another, which has 
been comparatively neglected: every leading man among 
the first settlers both of Plymouth and of Massachusetts 
Bay was born under Queen Elizabeth herself. William 
Bradford of Plymouth, for example, was born in 1590, 

23 



24 



The Seventeenth Century 



The First 
American 
Colonists 
of Eliza- 
bethan 
Birth. 



the year when Spenser published the first books of the 
Faerie Queene; and Edward Winslow was born in 1595, 
when Shakspere had pubhshed only Venus and Adonis 
and Lucrece. Thomas Dudley is said to have been born 
in 1576, some ten years before the execution of Mary Stuart. 
John Winthrop was born in 1588, the year of the Invinci- 
ble Armada. John Cotton was born in 1585, the year 
before Sir Philip Sidney was killed, when, for aught we 
know, Shakspere had not yet emerged from Stratford, and 
when surely John Foxc (1516-1587), the martyrologist, 
was still alive. Thomas Hooker was born only a year 
later, in 1586. Richard Mather was only ten years 
younger, born in the year when Ben Jonson's first play 
is said to have been acted, when Ralegh published his 
Discovery 0} Guiana, and Spenser the last three books of 
his Faerie Queene. Roger Williams was born in 1600, 
the year which gave us the first quartos of Henry IV, 
Henry V, A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, The Merchant 
0} Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing. And what is 
thus true of New England is truer still of Virginia, founded 
half a generation earlier. Though the sovereigns to whom 
both northern and southern colonies owed their first alle- 
giance were Stuarts, all the founders of these colonies were 
of true Elizabethan birth. 

They were not, to be sure, quite the kind of Ehzabethans 
who expressed themselves in poetry. The single work pro- 
duced in America which by any stretch of language may be 
held a contribution to Ehzabethan letters is a portion of 
George Sandys' translation of Ovid made during his so- 
journ in Virginia between 162 1 and 1624. In general, 
the settlers of Virginia were of the adventurous type which 
expresses itself far more in action than in words; while 



American History — IGOO to 1700 25 

the settlers of New England were too much devoted to the 
affairs of another world than this to have time, even if they 
had had taste, for devotion to any form of fine art. Yet 
for all their mutual detestation, Puritans and poets alike 
had the spontaneity of temper, the enthusiasm of purpose, 
and the versatility of power which marked Elizabethan 
England. 

Broadly speaking, all our northern colonies developed 
from those planted in Massachusetts, and all our southern 
from that planted in Virginia. The type of character 
which planted itself on the shores of Massachusetts Bay 
displayed from the beginning a marked power of assimi- 
lating whatever came within its influence. An equal 
power of assimilation marked the less austere type 
which first planted itself on the James River. North 
and South alike, then, may broadly be regarded as regions 
finally settled by native Ehzabethan Enghshmen, whose 
traits proved strong enough to impress themselves on pos- 
terity and to resist the immigrant influences of other tra- 
ditions than their own. 

Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were both settled by Dominant 
devout Calvinists. Both colonies were governed from xradit^na 
the beginning by written charters, things which, except in New 

England. 

for Cromwell's Instrument of Government, remain foreign 
to the political experience of native Englishmen, but which 
are pretty clearly the prototypes of those written consti- 
tutions under which the United States have grown and 
prospered. In both colonies, too, the ideals of dominant 
Puritanism prevailed from the beginning, more than half 
a generation before Cromwell dominated English history. 
In England, dominant Puritanism was transitory, — 
fatally unable to maintain itself among the complex 



26 The Seventeenth Century 

traditions which compose the historical continuity of the 
old world. In New England, on the other hand, there 
was no historical continuity, no tradition, no pohtical and 
social complexity, to check its growth. In England the 
Civil Wars came; then the Commonwealth; then the Pro- 
tectorate; then the Restora- 
tion. In the history of New 
England we find no epoch- 
making facts to correspond 
with these, no irruption of 
political ideals strange to the 
founders of our American 
Commonwealth, nor any es- 
sential change of dominant 
ideals, until the seventeenth 
century was over. What might 
have happened except for the 
d^tvT^^ fip--- Revolution of 1688, no one can 
say; but that revolution sub- 
stantially confirmed the traditions of the New England 
fathers. 

Throughout the seventeenth century, meanwhile, a fact 
had been developing itself on the American continent 
which was perhaps more significant to the future of New 
England than any in the history of the mother country. 
The French Bcforc 1610 the French had finally established themselves 
in the regions now known as Nova Scotia, and from that 
time French power was steadily extending itself to the 
northward and westward of the English colonies. This 
French domination of Canada and of the West meant the 
planting and the growth there of moral and political ideals 
utterly foreign to those English ideals which have finally 




in Canada. 



American History — IGOO to 1700 27 

come to characterize our people. The ideal for which the 
French power stood in religion and in politics alike was, 
in a word, the ideal of authority, — of a centralized earthly 
power which, so far as it reached, should absolutely con- 
trol human thought and conduct. 

Divine authority, of course. New England always recog- 
nized; but this it found expressed not in an established 
hierarchy, but in the written words of an inspired Bible. 
Temporal authority, too, New England recognized; but 
temporal authority secured by written charters, and so 
limited that it could never violate the traditional liberties 
of Englishmen. So the conflict between France and 
England in the New World was really a conflict between 
two incompatible systems of political principles, — Con- 
tinental absolutism . and the Common Law of England. 
Not until well into the eighteenth century, however, did 
France and England come to their death-grapple in 
America. In the seventeenth century, or at least until 
the last ten years of it, there was little more warfare in 
New England than the struggles of the Indians against 
the invading race which has long ago swept them away. 

The history of seventeenth-century New England, in The Seven- 
brief, is that of a dominant Puritanism, twenty years older ce^ntury in 
than Cromwell's and surviving his by forty years more, ^ew Eng- 

" . land. 

Amid the expanding life of a still unexplored contment, 
Puritanism was disturbed by no such environment as im- 
peded and fatally checked it in England. Rather, the 
only external fact which affected New England Puritanism 
at all, was one which strengthened it, — the threatening 
growth near by of a system as foreign to every phase of 
English thought as it was to Puritanism itself. 
The result may best be understood by comparing some 



28 



The Seventeenth Century 



Sewall's 
Diary. 



historical records of New England during the hundred 
years now in question. The earhest history of Plymouth 
is that of Governor Bradford, sometimes miscalled the 
"Log of the Mayflower "; the earliest history of Massachu- 
setts is that of Governor Winthrop. Winthrop, bom in 
1588, died in 1649; Bradford, born in 1590, died in 1657. 
Both were born under Queen Ehzabeth; both emigrated 

before English Puritanism 
was dominant; and neither 
survived to see the Restora- 
tion. Clearly, the state of life 
and feeling which they record 
belongs to the first period of 
the seventeenth century, — the 
period when mature men were 
still of Elizabethan birth. In 
1652, three years after Win- 
throp died and five years 
before the death of Bradford, 
Samuel Sewall was born in 
England. In 166 1, four years after Bradford's death, he was 
brought to Massachusetts, where he lived all his life, be- 
coming Chief Justice of the Superior Court. From 1674 to 
1 729 he kept his diary. Sewall's life, passed chiefly in Mas- 
sachusetts, was contemporary with the English literature 
between Walton's Complete Angler and Pope's Dunciad. 
Both Winthrop and Bradford, on the other hand, were 
bom before Shakspere was certainly known as a popular 
playwright. Yet comparison of Bradford's temper or 
Winthrop's with Sewall's will show -so many more points 
of resemblance than of difference that it is hard to realize 
how when Sewall began his diary — not to speak of when 







American History — 1600 to 1700 29 

he finished it — the generation to which Winthrop and 
Bradford belonged was almost extinct. The three books 
impress one as virtually contemporary. 

How different this social pause was from the social prog- The seven- 
ress of seventeenth-century England may be felt by simi- ce^ntu'r i 
larly comparing two familiar English records of the period. England. 
Lord Herbert of Cherbury (i 582-1 648) was almost exactly 
contemporary with Winthrop; his autobiography, written 
in his last years, is among the most characteristic social 
records in our language. Fifteen years before Lord Her- 
bert's death, and ten before he began his autobiography, 
Samuel Pepys was born, whose celebrated diary runs from 
1660 to 1669. Pepys stopped writing five years before 
Sewall began, and so far as age goes he might personally 
have known Lord Herbert. Yet the whole temper of 
Herbert is so remote from that of Pepys as to make their 
writing seem of different epochs. 

Almost any similar comparison will tell the same story. Ameri- 
Compare, for example, your impressions of Ralegh and ""^ ° 
of Marlborough; compare Bacon with Newton, or Ehza- retained 

Elizabeth- 

beth with William HI. Then name to yourself some of an Traits, 
the worthies who are remembered from seventeenth-cen- 
tury America. Bradford and Winthrop we have named 
already; Winslow and Dudley, too. Add to them Stan- 
dish, Endicott, Roger Williams, and John Eliot, the apostle 
to the Indians; John Cotton and Richard Mather; In- 
crease Mather, son of the one and son-in-law of the other; 
Cotton Mather, who combined the blood of the two im- 
migrant ministers; Sir William Phips; and Sewall, who 
with Stoughton and the rest sat in judgment on Salem 
witchcraft. You can hardly help admitting that, though 
the type of character in America could not remain quite 



30 Tlie Seventeenth Century 

stationary, the change between the earher years of the 
seventeenth century and its close was surprisingly less 
marked than was the change in England. A little thought 
will show what this means. Although the type of charac- 
ter which planted itself in New England during the first 
quarter of the seventeenth century was very Puritan and 
therefore, from the point of view of its contemporary Eng- 
lish hterature, very eccentric, it was truly an Elizabethan 
type. One conclusion seems clear: the native Yankees of 
1700 were incalculably nearer their Ehzabethan ancestors 
than were their contemporaries born in the mother country. 
National In this fact we come to a consideration worth pondering. 

ence^oV" Such histoHcal convulsions as those which declared them- 
America. sclvcs in the England of the seventeenth century result 
from the struggle of social and political forces in densely 
populated regions. Such slow social development as 
marks the seventeenth century in New England is pos- 
sible only under conditions where the pressure of external 
fact, social, political, and economic, is relaxed. Such 
changes as the course of history brought to seventeenth- 
century England are changes which must result to indi- 
viduals just as much as to nations themselves from some- 
thing which, for want of a more exact word, we may call 
experience. Such lack of change as marks the America 
of the seventeenth century indicates the absence of this. 
Yet even in the America of the seventeenth century a true 
nation, the nation of which we are a part, was growing 
towards maturity. Though the phrase seem paradoxical, 
it is surely true that our national hfe in its beginnings was 
something hardly paralleled in other history, — a century 
of national inexperience. 



IV 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 1600 TO 1700 

References 
captain john smith 

Works: Smith's Works, cd. Edward Arber, 2 vols., Westminster: 
Constable, 1895 ("The English Scholar's Library," No. 16). 

Biography and Criticism: W. G. Simms, Life of Captain John 
Smith, New York: Cooledge, 1846; *C. D. Warner, A Study of the Life 
and Writings of John Smith, New York: Holt, 1881. 

Bibliography: Smith's Works, ed. Arber, I, cxxx-cxxxii; Win- 
sor's America, III, 161-162, 211-212; Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 97 
and 109. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, I, Nos. 62, 90; Stedman and 
Hutchinson, I, 5-17. 

BRADFORD 

Works: History, ed. Charles Deane, Boston, 1856 (4 Mass. Hist. 
Soc. Coll., III). Also (same year and place) as a separate publication. 
Another edition, Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1898. 

Biography and Criticism: Tyler, I, 1 16-126; Winsor's America, III, 
Chapter viii. 

Bibliography; Winsor's America, III, 283-289; Channing and Hart, 
Guide, §§ 111-112. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, I, Nos. 49, 97-100, 117; Stedman 
and Hutchinson, I, 93-115. 

WINTHROP 

Works: The best edition of Winthrop's History of New England is 
that by James Savage, 2 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1853. There 
is an earlier edition by Savage, 2 vols., Boston, 1825-26. 

Biography and Criticism: *R. C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John 
Winthrop, 2 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1864; J. H. Twitchell, 
John Winthrop, New York; Dodd, Mead & Co., 1891; *Tyler, 1, 128-136. 

Bibliography : Winsor's America, III, 357-358; Channing and Hart, 
Guide, § 117. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, I, Nos. 107, 118; Stedman and 
Hutchinson, I, 291-309. 

31 



32 The Seventeenth Century 



Works : Sewall's Diary, 3 vols., Boston, 1878-82 (5 Mass. Hist. See. 
Coll., V-VII). 

Biography and Criticism : N. H. Chamberlain, Samuel Sewall and 
the World he lived in, Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske & Co., 1897; *Tyler, II, 
99-103; H.C.Lodge, "A Puritan Pepys," Studies in History, Boston: 
Houghton, 1892, 21-84. 

Bibliography: Wmsor's America, Y, 167-168. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, I, No. 149; II, Nos. 18, 103; 
Stedman and Hutchinson, II, 188-200. 

BAY PSALM BOOK 

Text: A literal reprint of the first edition was published privately at 
Cambridge in 1862 under the direction of Dr. N. B. Shurtleflf. More 
accessible is the reprint edited by Wilberforce Eames, New York : Dodd, 
Mead & Co., 1903. 

Criticism : Tyler, I, 2 74-2 7 7 ; Winsor's Memorial History of Boston, 1, 
458-460. 

Bibliography : Winsor (see reference above) ; Wilberforce Eames, A 
List 0} Editions 0} the "Bay Psalm Book," New York: Privately printed, 
1885. 

Selections : Hart, Contemporaries, I, No. 138; Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, I, 2 II -2 1 6. 

WARD 

Works : The Simple Cobbler 0} Aggawam in America, ed. David 
Pulsifcr, Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1843. 

Biography and Criticism: J. W. Dean, Memoir 0} the Rev. Nathan- 
iel Ward, Albany : Munsell, 1868; Tyler, I, 227-241. 

Bibliography: Winsor's America, III, 350 n. 

Selections : Hart, Contemporaries, I, No. 112; Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, I, 276-285. 

WIGGLESWORTH 

Works : The Day 0} Doom, ed. J. W. Dean, New York, 1867. 
Biography and Criticism: J. W. Dean's Memoir of Wigglesworth, 
Albany: Munsell, 187 1. 

Bibliography: Ward's Memoir, 140-151. 
Selections : Stedman and Hutchinson, II, 3-19. 

Anne Bradstreet 
Works : Works, ed. J. H. Ellis, Charlestown: Abram E. Cutter, 1867; 
also ed. C. E. Norton, privately printed, 1897. 



Character. 



Literature in America — 1600 to 1700 33 

Biography and Criticism: Helen Ca.m^he\\, Anne Bradstreel arid Her 
Time, Boston: Lothrop, 1891; Tyler, I, 277-292. 

Selections : Stedman and Hutchinson, I, 311-315. 

An instructive impression of the character of Hterature in 
America during the seventeenth century may be derived 
from Mr. Whitcomb's Chronological Outlines (pages 2-48). 
Speaking roughly, we may say that out of about two hun- 
dred and fifteen titles which he records, one hundred and 
ten are religious works, of whicli all but one were pro- .General 
duced in New England. Next comes history, beginning 
with Captain John Smith's True Relation, 1608, which 
has no more right to be included in American literature 
than would a book written in our own time by any foreign 
writer. Of these historical titles there are fifty-seven, of 
which thirty-seven belong to New England; the others, 
including the separate works of Captain John Smith, 
come either from Virginia or from. the middle colonies. 
Twenty of Mr. Whitcomb's titles may be called political; 
of these only three are not from New England. Of nine- 
teen other titles, including almanacs and scientific works 
which may best be called miscellaneous, all but two belong 
in New England. Finally, there are nine titles to which 
the name literature may properly be applied, if under this 
head we include not only the poems of Mrs. Bradstreet, 
but the "Bay Psalm Book," the Day 0} Doom,^a.nd the 
first New England Primer. Of these nine books the only 
one not from New England was the portion of Ovid's 
Metamorphoses which George Sandys (1577-1644) trans- 
lated in Virginia. 

This rough classification shows: (i) that New England 
produced so large a proportion of American books during 
the seventeenth century that we hardly need consider the 



Writings. 



34 The Seventeenth Century 

rest of the colonies; and (2) that of the books written in 
New England, the greater number were concerned with 
religious and historical matters. It will be worth while 
to consider the general traits of these two classes of books 
before we pass on to three of the nine works which may be 
called literature. 
Religious The religious writing, best represented by the works of 
Cotton Mather, who is the subject of our next chapter, 
includes also such works as those of Thomas Hooker 
(about 1 586-1 647), of Cambridge and later of Hartford, of 
Thomas Shepard (1605-1649), who was Hooker's suc- 
cessor at Cambridge, and of John Cotton (i 585-1652) 
of Boston. Men like these, deeply learned in the Bible 
and books about the Bible, in the Greek and Latin clas- 
sics as well, but very slightly influenced by contemporary 
Elizabethan writings, had enormous influence. Their 
words, preached or written, weighed only a little less than 
the Word of God itself. Their writings, mainly sermons 
and controversial pamphlets, are grim, unsparing ap- 
plications of Calvinistic teaching to public affairs and to 
the smallest concerns of private life. These works have 
little beauty of style; in plan they often seem hardly more 
than masses of Bible texts put together with a thin 
thread of comment. But, although disdainful of grace, 
these religious writings of seventeenth-century New Eng- 
land are heroically earnest, and occasionally they melt 
into a sombre tenderness of phrase which is far from 
unlovely. 

The historical writing includes not only the two famous 
histories of the period, the annals 0/ Plymouth Plantation 
by Governor William Bradford (i 590-1657) of the 
Plymouth Colony and the History of New England by 



Litef^ature in America — 1000 to 1700 35 

Governor John Winthrop (i 588-1649), but such minor 
works as New England'' s Memorial, 1669, by Nathaniel 
Morton (1613-1685); William Wood's New England's 
Prospect, 1634 ; the so-called Moiirfs Relation, 1622, 
probably by Governor Bradford and Edward Winslovi^ Historical 
(1595-1655); and Captain Edward Johnson's Wonder- ^"*'"8s. 
working Providence 0} Sion''s Saviour in New England, 
1645. This last title is significant: history in America 
during this seventeenth century, whether a private diary, 
or the history of a war, or whatever else, was the devout 
record of the hand of God guiding the affairs of human 
beings. Again, this history was not of the sort which 
calmly views events in the perspective of time, but it was 
written by men who when they took up the pen to write of 
one battle kept within their reach the sword which they 
might presently need for the next. Much of their work is 
accordingly in the form of diaries and annals. If we re- 
member that it was very devout and very personal, frag- 
mentary in form, usually uncouth in style, but almost 
always sternly direct and sometimes unwittingly memo- 
rable in phrasing, we shall recognize its most important 
traits. 

Contrasting these impressions with our summary of 
English literature during this seventeenth century, — the 
century of Shakspere, of Milton, and of Dryden, — it 
seems at first as if America produced no literature at all. 
Looking more carefully, however, we see that in Eliza- 
bethan England along with supreme poetry there was also 
both lasting prose, like that of Hooker, of Bacon, and of 
Ralegh, and such minor prose records and annals as are 
typified by Hakluyt's Voyages, together with a good 
deal of now forgotten religious writing. In English litera- ' 



36 TJie Seventeenth Century 

ture, these last sorts of writing are unimportant; they 
were generally produced not by men of letters, but either 
by men of action or by earnest, uninspired men of God. 
Now the men who founded the colonies of Virginia and 
of New England were on the one hand men of action, and 
on the other, men of God. It is precisely such matter as 
Elizabethan Englishmen left in books now remembered 
only as material for history that the fathers of America 
produced throughout the first century of our national 
inexperience. 
"Bay If we seek* in New England for traces of pure literature 

Boo"" during the seventeenth century, indeed, we shall discover 
hardly anything before the "Bay Psalm Book," produced 
under the supervision of Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, 
and John Eliot, in 1640. An extract from the preface 
and from the Nineteenth Psalm will give a sufficient taste 
of its quahty: — 

"If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as 
some may desire or expect; let them consider that God's Altar needs 
not our pollishings : Ex. 20. for wee have respected rather a plaine 
translation, then to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any 
paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather then Elegance, 
fidelity rather than poetry, in translating the hebrew words into eng- 
lish language, and Davids poetry into english meetre; that soe we 
may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his owne 
will; untill hee take us from hence, and wipe away all our teares, & 
bid us enter into our masters ioye to sing eternall Halleluiahs." 



"PS.\LME XIX 

To the chief e Musician a psalme oj David 

The heavens doe declare 
the majesty of God; 



Literature in America — 1600 to 1700 37 

also the firmament shews forth 
his handy-work abroad. 

2 Day speaks to day, knowledge 

night hath to night declar'd. 

3 There neither speach nor language is, 

where their voyce is not heard. 

4 Through all the earth their line 

is gone forth, & unto 
the utmost end of all the world, 

their speaches reach also : 
A Tabernacle hee 

in them pitcht for the Sun. 

5 Who Bridegroom like from's chamber goes 

glad Giants-race to run. 

6 From heavens utmost end, 

his course and compassing ; 
to ends of it, & from the heat 
thereof is hid nothing. " 

The King James version of the same psalm, published less 
than thirty years before, was perfectly familiar to the men 
who hammered out this barbarous imitation of a metre 
similarly used by the Earl of Surrey in the time of Henry 
VIII. This fact should give a sufficient idea of the lit- 
erary spirit which controlled the Puritan fathers. 

The next monument of literature in America is note- Ward's 
worthy only because it was written there, and not in Eng 
land. In 1647, the Reverend Nathaniel Ward of Aga- Aggawam. 
wam (now Ipswich), Massachusetts, published his Simple 
Cobbler of Aggawam, who, as he declared on the title-page, 
was " willing to help 'mend his Native Country, lamentably 
tattered, both in the upper-Leather and Sole, with all the 
honest stitches he can take." The book is a violent attack 
upon the relaxed attitude of the church in tolerating shades 
of belief, upon frivolity in dress and manners, and upon 



Simple 
Cobbler of 



38 The Seventeenth Century 

the "wearisome wars," the Civil Wars in England, which 
he desires may be brought to a "comely, brotherly, sea- 
sonable, and reasonable cessation." 

Fifteen years later, in 1662, Michael Wiggles worth 
(1631-1715), then minister of Maiden, Massachusetts, 
published his Day 0} Doom, or, A Poetical Description of 
the Great and Last Judgment, which retained its influence 
in New England for about a century. Of this the "Plea 
of the Infants" is example enough: 

"If for our own transgression, 

or disobedience, 
We here did stand at thy left hand 

just were the Recompence : 
But Adam's guih our souls hath spilt, 

his fault is charg'd on us : 
And that alone hath overthrown, 

and utterly undone us. 

"Not we, but he ate of the Tree, 

whose fruit was interdicted; 
Yet on us all of his sad Fall, 

the punishment's inflicted. 
How could we sin that had not been 

or how is his sin our 
Without consent which to prevent, 

we never had a pow'r?" 

And so on for several stanzas, after which the Lord 
pronounces this judgment: 

"You sinners are, and such a share 
as sinners may expect. 
Such you shall have; for I do save 
none but my own Elect. 



Literature in America — 1600 to 1700 39 

Yet to compare your sin with their 

who Hved a longer time, 
I do confess yours is much less, 

though every sin's a crime. 

"A crime it is, therefore in bliss 

you may not hope to dwell ; 
But unto you I shall allow 

the easiest room in Hell. 
The glorious King thus answering, 

they cease and plead no longer : 
Their Consciences must needs confess 

his reasons are the stronger. " 

Such work is more characteristic of seventeenth-century Mrs. 
America than is the verse of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet ^'^**is*"«t- 
(i6i2 or 1613-1672), daughter of the elder Governor Dud- 
ley. A few verses from a volume entitled Several Poems 
Compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full 0} 
Delight, which was published in 1678, six years after Mrs. 
Bradstreet's death, wiU show her at her best: 

"When I behold the heavens as in their prime. 

And then the earth (though old) still clad in green, 
The stones and trees, insensible of time. 

Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen ; 
If Winter come, and greenness then do fade, 
A Spring returns, and they more youthful made ; 
But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid. 

**0 Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things, 

That draws oblivion's curtains over kings. 
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not, 

Their names without a record are forgot. 
Their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in th' dust, 
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings 'scape time's rust; 
But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone 
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. " 



40 



The Seventeenth Century 



Summary. 



The 
Mathers. 



Mrs. Bradstreet's family, as the career of her brother, 
Governor Joseph Dudley, indicates, kept in closer touch 
with England than was common in America; and besides 
she was clearly a person of what would nowadays be called 
culture. Partly for these reasons her work seems neither 
individual nor local. In seventeenth-century New Eng- 
land, indeed, she stands alone, without forerunners or fol- 
lowers; and if you compare her poetry with that of the 
old country, you will find it very like such then antiquated 
work as the Noscc Teipsum of Sir John Davics, published 
in 1599, the year which gave us the final version of Romeo 
and Juliet. In its own day, without much doubt, the 
little pure literature of seventeenth-century New England 
was already archaic. 

Apart from this, New England produced only annals, 
records, and, far more characteristically, writings of the 
class which may be grouped broadly under theology. Just 
as our glance at the history of seventeenth-century America 
revealed no central convulsions like the Commonwealth, 
dividing an old epoch from a new, so our glance at the 
American publications of this century reveals no central 
figure like Milton's standing between the old Elizabethan 
world which clustered about Shakspere, and the new, 
almost modern, school of letters which gathered about 
Dryden. 

A fact perhaps more characteristic of seventeenth-cen- 
tury America than any publication was the foundation 
in 1636 of Harvard College, intended to preserve for pos- 
terity that learned ministry which was the distinguishing 
glory of the immigrant Puritans. In the history of Har- 
vard College during the seventeenth century the most con- 
spicuous individuals were probably President Increase 



Literature in America — 1600 to 1700 41 

Mather (1639-1723) and his son Cotton Mather 
(1663-1728). The younger of these wrote very volumi- 
nously. During forty-two years of literary activity, how- 
ever, he never changed either his style or his temper. His 
work falls chiefly though not wholly under the two heads 
of religion and history, which with him were so far from 
distinct that it is often hard to say under which a given 
work or passage should be grouped. These heads are the 
same which we have seen to include most American 
writings of the seventeenth century. Cotton Mather's 
work, in short, is so thoroughly typical of American pub- 
lications throughout his time that a little study of him will 
best define for us what seventeenth-century writing in 
America really was. 



V 

COTTON MATHER 

References 

Works : No collected edition. The Magnalia has been thrice reprinted, 
2 vols., Hartford, 1820, 1853, and *i855. 

Biography and Criticism : A. B. P. Marvin, The Life and Times of 
Cotton Mather, Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1892; *B. 
Wendell, Cotton Mather, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1891; *Tyler, 
II, 64-91. 

Bibliography : J. L. Sibley, Harvard Craduates, III, 42-158. 

Selections: Carpenter, 4-12; Duyckinck, I, 64-66; Hart, Contem- 
poraries, I, No. 148, and II, No. 12; Stedman and Hutchinson, II, 114- 
166. 

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was the son of Increase 
Mather, a minister already eminent, and the grandson of 
John Cotton and of Richard Mather, two highly distin- 
guished ministers of the immigration. In 1678 he took 
his degree at Harvard College. Only three years later, in 
1 68 1, he became associated with his father as minister of 
the Second Church in Boston, where he preached all his 
life. 

To understand both his personal history and his literary 
work, we must never forget that the Puritan fathers had 
believed New England charged with a divine mission to 
show the world what human society might be when gov- 
erned by constant devotion to the revealed law of God. 
This is nowhere better stated than by Cotton Mather him- 
self in the general introduction to his Magnalia : 

42 



Cotton Mather 43 

"In short, the First Age was the Golden Age: To return unto That, 
will make a Man a Protestant, and I may add, a Puritan. 'T is 
possible, that our Lord Jesus Christ carried some Thousands of 
Rejormers into the Retirement of an American Desert, on purpose, 
that with an opportunity granted unto many of his Faithful Servants, 
to enjoy the precious Liberty of their Mmistry, tho' in the midst of 
many Temptations all their days, He might there To them first, and 
then By them, give a Specimen of many good Things, which he would 
have His Churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto: And This being 
done, He knows whether there be not All Done, that New England 
was planted for ; and whether the Plantation may not, soon after 
this. Come to Nothing. " 

In the course of seventy years, the political power of 
ministers had tended on the whole to wane. Increase and 
Cotton Mather, able and earnest men, opposed with all 
their hearts every innovating tendency. Thus, with many 
other ministers, they were forced into active support of 
the witch-trials at Salem in 1692. The collapse of these The End of 
trials, in spite of ministerial effort, may be said to mark the in^^^e^'^*^^ 
end of theocracy in New England. Nine years later, in England. 
1 701, the orthodox party in the church had another blow. 
Increase Mather, after sixteen years as President of Har- 
vard College, was finally displaced by a divine of more 
liberal tendencies. This really ended the pubhc career 
of both father and son. In the pubhc life of New Eng- 
land, as in that of the mother country, we may say, the 
ideal of the Common Law finally supplanted the theo- 
cratic ideal of the Puritans, and at the oldest of New 
England seminaries the ideal of Protestantism finally 
vanquished that of priesthood. 

Cotton Mather lived on until 1728, preaching, writing 
numberless books, and doing much good scientific work; 
among other things, he was the first person in the English- 



44 The Seventeenth Century 

speaking world to practise inoculation for small-pox. Un- 
tiringly busy, hoping against hope for well on to thirty 
years, he died at last with the word Fructuosus * on his 
hps as a last counsel to his son. Undoubtedly he was 
eccentric and fantastic, so stubborn, too, that those who 
love progress have been apt to think him almost as bad 
as he was queer. For all his personal eccentricity, however, 
he seems on the whole the most complete type of the oldest- 
fashioned divine of New England. He was born in Boston 
and educated at Harvard College; he lived in Boston all 
his life, never straying a hundred miles away. Whatever 
else his life and work mean, they cannot help expressing 
what human existence taught the most intellectually active 
of seventeenth-century Yankees. 

Here, of course, we are concerned with him only as a 
man of letters. His literary activity was prodigious. Sib- 
ley's Harvard Graduates records some four hundred titles 
of his actual publications; besides this, he wrote an un- 
published treatise on medicine which would fill a folio vol- 
ume; and his unpublished Bihlia Americana — an exhaus- 
tive commentary on the whole Bible — would fill two or 
three folios more. He also left behind him many sermons, 
not to speak of letters and diaries, which have never seen 
print. And, at the same time, he was one of the busiest 
ministers, one of the most insatiable scholars and readers, 
and one of the most active politicians whom America has 
ever known. 

To discuss in detail such an outpour is impracticable; 
but Cotton Mather's most celebrated book, Magnalia 
Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New 
England, which was made towards the middle of his life 

* Fruitful. 



Cotton 31 either 



4>5 



and which includes reprints of a number of brief works 
pubHshed earHer, typifies all he did as a man of letters, 
before or afterwards. It was begun, his diary tells us, 
in 1693; and although not published until 1702, it was 
virtually finished in 1697. These dates throw light on 
what the book really means; they come just between the The Mag- 
end of those witchcraft trials which broke the political °*'**' 
power of the clergy, and the 
final defeat of the Mathers in 
their endeavor to retain the 
government of Harvard Col- 
lege. Though tradition still 
holds this endeavor to have 
been chiefly a matter of per- 
sonal ambition, whoever comes 
intimately to know the Math- 
ers must feel that to them 
the question seemed far other- 
wise. What both had at heart 
was a passionate desire that 
New England should remain 

true to the cause of the fathers, which both believed 
indisputably the cause of God. In the years when the 
Magnalia was writing, there seemed a chance that if con- 
temporary New England could awaken to a sense of what 
pristine New England had been, all might still go well. 
So the Magnalia, though professedly a history, may bet- 
ter be regarded as a passionate controversial tract. Its 
true motive was to excite so enthusiastic a sympathy with 
the ideals of the Puritan fathers that, whatever fate might 
befall the civil government, their ancestral seminary of 
learning should remain true to its colors. 




Co/Tort c^^S. 



46 The Seventeenth Century 

At the time when the Magnalia was conceived, the New 
England colonies were about seventy years old. Broadly 
speaking, there had flourished in them three generations, — 
the immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren. 
The time was come. Cotton Mather thought, when the 
history of these three generations might be critically ex- 
amined; if this examination should result in showing that 
there had lived in New England an unprecedented pro- 
portion of men and women and children whose earthly ex- 
istence had given signs that they were pleasing to God, 
then his book might go far to prove that the pristine policy 
of New England had been especially favored of the Lord. 
For surely the Lord would most gladly plant His chosen 
ones in places where life was conducted most nearly in 
accordance with His will. 

Cotton Mather consequently writes in a spirit very dif- 
ferent from that of a critical modern historian. In his 
general narrative, for example, he hardly mentions the 
Antinomian controversy, and has little to say of such 
subsequently famous personages as Roger Williams or 
Its Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. On the other hand, he details 

at loving length, first the lives of those governors and 
magistrates who seemed especial servants of the Lord, 
from Bradford and Winthrop and Theophilus Eaton to 
Sir William Phips; and next the hves and spiritual ex- 
periences of a great number of the immigrant clergy and of 
their successors in the pulpit. He recounts the history of 
Harvard College during its first sixty years; and he lays 
down with surprising lucidity the orthodox doctrine and 
discipline of the New England churches. These matters 
fill five of the seven books into which the Magnalia is di- 
vided. The last two books portray the reverse of the 



Contents. 



Cotton Mather 47 

picture; one deals with "Remarkable Mercies and Judg- 
ments on many particular persons among the people of 
New England," and the other with "The Wars of the 
Lord — the Afflictive Disturbances which the Churches 
of New England have suffered from their various adver- 
saries ; and the Wonderful Methods and Mercies, whereby 
the Churches have been delivered." Full of petty personal 
anecdote, and frequently revealing not only bigoted preju- 
dice but grotesque superstition, these last two books have 
been more generally remembered than the rest; but they 
are by no means the most characteristic. 

The prose epic of New England Puritanism, the Mag- 
nalia has been called, setting forth in heroic mood the 
principles, the history, and the personal characters of the 
fathers. The principles, theologic and disciplinary alike, 
are stated with clearness, dignity, and fervor. The history, its 
though its less welcome phases are often lightly emphasized "^^'"p^^* 
and its details are hampered by no deep regard for minor 
accuracy, is set forth with a sincere ardor which makes its 
temper more instructive than that of many more trust- 
worthy records. And the life-like portraits of the Lord's 
chosen, though full of quaintly fantastic phrasing and 
artless pedantry, are often drawn with touches of enthu- 
siastic beauty. 

The last clause of a ponderous sentence from his life 
of Thomas Shepard, first minister of Cambridge, is far 
imore characteristic of Mather than are many of the oddi- 
ties commonly thought of when his name is mentioned : — 

"As he was a very Studious Person, and a very lively Preacher ; 
and one who therefore took great Pains in his Preparations for his 
Pubhck Labours, which Preparations he would usually finish on 
Saturday, by two a Clock in the Afternoon ; with respect whereunto 



48 



The Seventeenth Century 



he once used these Words, God will curse that Man's Labours, that 
lumbers up and down in the World all the Week, and then upon 
Saturday, in the afternoon goes to his Study ; whereas God knows, 
that Time were little enough to pray in and weep in, and get his Heart 
into a fit Frame jor the Duties of the approaching Sabbath; So the 
Character of his daily Conversation, was A Trembling Walk with 
God." 



Elizabeth- 
an Traits 
in the 
Magnalia. 



"A trembling walk with God," — you shall look far for a 
nobler phrase than that, or for one which should more truly 
characterize not only Thomas Shepard, but the better life 
of all the first century of New England, where the pressure 
of external fact was politically and socially relaxed ; where, 
except with the brute forces of nature, the struggle for ex- 
istence was less fierce than in almost any other region now 
remembered. 

The Magnalia is full of an enthusiasm which, in spite 
of the pedantic queerness of Mather's style, one grows to 
feel more and more vital. Amid all its vagaries and oddi- 
ties, one feels too a trait which even our single extract may 
perhaps indicate. Again and again, Cotton Mather writes 
with a rhythmical beauty which recalls the enthusiastic 
spontaneity of Elizabethan English. And though the 
Magnalia hardly reveals the third characteristic of EHza- 
bethan England, no one can read the facts of Cotton 
Mather's busy, active life without feeling that this man 
himself, who wrote with enthusiastic spontaneity, and who 
in his earthly life was minister, politician, man of science, 
scholar, and constant organizer of innumerable good works, 
embodied just that kind of restless versatility which char- 
acterized Elizabethan England and which to this day re- 
mains characteristic of native Yankees. 

For if the lapse of seventy years had not left New Eng- 



Cotton Mather 49 

land unchanged, it had aUcrcd hfe there far less than men 
have supposed. The Magnalia was published two years 
after Dryden died; yet it groups itself not with such work 
as Dryden's, but rather with such earher work as that of 
Fuller or even of Burton. As a man of letters, Cotton 
Mather, who died in the reign of George II, had more 
in common w^ith that generation of his ancestors which 
was born Under the last of the Tudors than with any later 
kind of native Englishmen. 



VI 

SUMMARY 

Our glance at the literary history of America during 
the seventeenth century has revealed these facts: in 1630, 
when Boston was founded, the mature inhabitants of 
America, like their brethren in England, were native 
Elizabethans; in 1700 this race had long been in its grave. 
In densely populated England, meanwhile, historical pres- 
sure — social, political, and economic alike — had wrought 
such changes in the national character as are marked 
by the contrast between the figures of Elizabeth and of 
King William III. National experience had altered the 
dominant type of native EngHshmen. In America the 
absence of any such external pressure had preserved to an 
incalculable degree the spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile 
character of the original immigrants. In literature, sev- 
enteenth-century England had expressed itself in at least 
three great and distinct moods, of which the dominant 
figures were Shakspere, Milton, and Drydcn. Though 
America had meanwhile produced hardly any pure letters, 
it had continued, long after Elizabethan temper had faded 
from the native literature of England, to keep alive with 
little alteration those minor phases of Elizabethan thought 
and feeling which had expressed the temper of the ances- 
tral Puritans. In history and in literature alike, the story 
of seventeenth- century America is a story of unique na- 
tional inexperience. 

50 



BOOK II 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK II 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

I 

ENGLISH HISTORY FROM 1700 TO 1800 

Referexcks 
Gardiner, Chapters xliv-lii. 

When the eighteenth century began, the reign of Will- The Sov- 
iam III was about as near its close as that of Elizabeth *''®'^"^- 
was a hundred years before. In 1702 William was suc- 
ceeded by Queen Anne. In 1714 George I followed her, 
founding the dynasty which still holds the throne. George 
II succeeded him in 1727; and in 1760 came George III, 
whose reign extended till 1820. The names of these sov- 
ereigns instantly suggest certain familiar facts, of which 
the chief is that during the first half of the century the 
succession remained somewhat in doubt. It was only in 
1745, when the reign of George II was more than half 
finished, that the last fighting with Stuart pretenders oc- 
curred on British soil. Though on British soil, however, 
this contest was not on English : there has been no actual 
warfare in England since 1685, when the battle of Sedg- 
moor suppressed the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion 
against James II. These obvious facts indicate historical 
circumstances which have had profound effect on English 
character. 

S3 



54 



The Eighteenth Century 



The Eight- 
eenth Cen- 
tury in 
England a 
Period of 
Stability. 



England 

and 

France. 



During the past two centuries the commercial prosperity 
of England has exceeded that of most other countries. 
An imperative condition of such prosperity is peace and 
domestic order. Good business demands a state of Hfe 
which permits people to devote themselves to their own 
affairs, trusting politics to those whose office it is to gov- 
ern. Under such circumstances eighteenth-century Eng- 
Hshmen had small delight in civil wars and disputed 
successions. Accordingly they displayed increasing confi- 
dence in parliamentary government, which could give Eng- 
land what divine right could no longer give it, — prosperous 
public order. In the course of the eighteenth century, 
there steadily grew a body of pubhc opinion, at last over- 
whelming, which tended to the maintenance of established 
institutions. 

So this eighteenth century brought to England far less 
radical changes than those which marked the preceding. 
Though the interval between the deaths of George III 
and William of Orange is far longer than that between 
WiUiam's and Queen Ehzabeth's, we can feel between the 
Prince of Orange and his native English successor no 
such contrast as we felt between William and the last 
Tudor queen. For all that, the century was not stagnant; 
and perhaps our simplest way of estimating its progress is 
by four well- remembered Enghsh battles. In 1704 was 
fought the battle of Blenheim; in 1745, that of Fontenoy; 
in 1759 Wolfe fell victorious at Quebec; and in 1798 Nel- 
son won the first of his great naval victories — the battle of 
the Nile. 

Whatever else these battles have in common, all four 
were fought against the French,^ — the one continental 
power whose coast is in sight of England. Throughout 



English History — 1700 to 1800 55 

the century, apparently, the EngHsh Channel was apt to 
be an armed frontier; the geographical isolation of England 
was tending politically toward that international isolation 
which until our own time has been so marked. A second 
fact about these four battles is almost as obvious. How- 
ever important the questions at issue, people nowadays 
have generally forgotten what Blenheim and Fontenoy 
were fought about. The other two battles which we have 
called to mind, those of Quebec and of the Nile, were 
fought in the second half of the century; and of these 
tradition still remembers the objects. The battle of Que- 
bec finally assured the dominance in America of the Eng- 
lish Law. The battle of the Nile began to check that 
French revolutionary power which under the transitory 
empire of Napoleon once seemed about to conquer the 
whole civilized world, and which met its final defeat sev- 
enteen years later at Waterloo. 

The names of Blenheim and the Nile suggest one more Theinsu- 
fact: each of these battles gave England a national hero. England. 
Marlborough we have already glanced at, — a soldier of the 
closing seventeenth century as well as of the dawning eight- 
eenth, whose career asserted that in the political struggles 
of continental Europe England could never be left out of 
account. Nelson, whose name is almost as familiarly 
associated with the battle of the Nile as with his victorious 
death at Trafalgar, stood for even more ; he embodied not 
only that dominion of the sea which since his time England 
has maintained, but also that growing imperial power 
which was able to withstand and ultimately to check the 
imperial force of France incarnate in Napoleon. Im- 
perial though Nelson's victories were, however. Nelson 
himself was almost typically insular. As we compare 



56 The Eighteenth Century 

Marlborough, the chief Enghsh hero of the opening 
century, with Nelson, the chief English hero of its close, 
Marlborough seems a European and Nelson an Enghsh- 
man. This fact implies the whole course of English his- 
tory in the eighteenth century. Just as the internal 
history of England tended to a more and more con- 
servative preservation of public order, so her international 
history tended more and more to make Englishmen a 
race apart. 

Before the century was much more than half done, this 
insular Enghsh race had on its hands something more than 
the island where its language, its laws, its traditions, and 
its character had been developed; something more, be- 
Coioniai sides, than those American colonies whose history during 
Expansion, ^j^^j^ ^^^^ ccntury wc have already traced. As the name of 
Quebec has already reminded us, the wars with the French 
had finally resulted in the conquest by the Enghsh Law 
of those American regions which had threatened to make 
American history that of a ceaseless conflict between Eng- 
• hsh institutions and those of continental Europe. The 
same years which had brought about the conquest of 
Canada had also achieved the conquest of that Indian 
Empire which still makes England potent in Asia. In 
1760, when George III came to the throne, imperial 
England, which included the thirteen colonies of North 
America, seemed destined to impose its image on the 
greatest continents of both hemispheres. 

Twenty years later the American Revolution had broken 
all political union between those regions in the old world 
and in the new which have steadily been dominated by 
English Law. That on both sides of the Atlantic the 
Common Law has been able to survive this shock is per- 



English History — 1700 to 1800 57 

haps the most conclusive evidence of vitaHty in its long 
and varied history. The Revolution itself we shall con- The 
sider more closely later: one fact about it we may remark r^q^u-'' 
here. Until the Revolution, America, like England, had tion: 
considered France a traditional enemy. Open warfare and French 
with England naturally brought America and France to- ^^^^ °^ 
gether; without French aid, indeed, our independence could 
hardly have been established. A very few years conse- 
quently awoke among Americans a general sentiment of 
strong nominal sympathy with the French. At the moment 
when this declared itself, France was blindly developing 
that abstract philosophy of human rights which less than 
twenty years later resulted in the French Revolution. 
This philosophy was eagerly welcomed in America, where 
it has been popular ever since. In no way, however, has 
America evinced its English origin more clearly than by 
the serenity with which it has forbidden logic to meddle 
with the substantial maintenance of legal institutions. 

But our concern now is with England, who found conserva- 
herself, when the French Revolution had done its work, g^™ °n^ 
the only uninvaded conservative power of Europe. 
The conservatism for which she stood, and has stood 
ever since, is of the kind which defends tradition 
against the assaults of untested theory. Without ig- 
noring human rights, it maintains that the most precious 
human rights are those which have proved humanly 
feasible; abstract ideals of law and government, how- 
ever admirable on paper, it regards with such suspicion 
as in daily life practical men feel concerning the va- 
garies of plausible thinkers who cannot make both ends 
meet. The conservatism of eighteenth-century England, 
in short, defended against untested philosophy the ex- 



58 The Eighteenth Century 

perience embodied in the Common Law; it defended 
custom, which at worst had proved tolerable, against 
theory, which had never been put to proof. So in this 
closing struggle of the eighteenth century, which con- 
tinued for half a generation after the century ended, 
external forces combined with internal ones, — with a full 
century of domestic peace, and the final settlement of the 
royal succession, — to develop in England that isolated, de- 
liberate, somewhat slow-witted character which foreigners 
now suppose permanently English. 
John The typical Englishman of modern caricature is named 

John Bull. What he looks like is familiar to any reader 
of the comic papers. There is a deep significance, when 
we stop to think, in the fact that the costume still attrib- 
uted to John Bull is virtually that of the English middle 
classes in 1800. No date better marks the moment when 
external forces and internal had combined to make typical 
of England the insular, vigorous, intolerant character em- 
bodied in that familiar and portly figure. Whatever else 
John Bull may be, he is not spontaneous, not enthusiastic, 
and not versatile. 



Bull 



II 

ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1700 TO 1800 

References 

In addition to the general authorities (see p. vii) one may consult 
Alexandre Beljame, Le public et les hommes de Ictires en Angleterre an 
dix-huitu-me suck, Paris: Hachette, 1881; Sir Leslie Stephen, £«^/w/j 
Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Putnams, 
1904; Edmund Gosse, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, 
London: Macmillan, 1889; T. S. Perry, English Literature in the Eight- 
eenth Century, New York: Harper, 1883; H. A. Beers, A History 0} 
English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Holt, 1890. 

The English literature of the eighteenth century is very The xh 
different from that of the century before. The three lit- p^'"'°'*^- 
erary periods of the seventeenth century were dominated 
by three great figures, — those of Shakspere, of Milton, 
and of Dryden. While no such eminence as theirs marks 
the literary history of the century with which we are now 
concerned, three typical figures of its different periods may 
conveniently be called to mind, — Addison, Johnson, and 
Burke, The very mention of these names must instantly 
define the contrast now worth our attention. The sev- 
enteenth century was one of decided literary development, 
or at least of change. In comparison the eighteenth cen- 
tury was one of marked monotony. 

The literature of its beginning is traditionally associated The Pe- 
with the name of Queen Anne almost as closely as that of Q°een 
a hundred years before is with the name of Queen Eliza- Anne, 
beth. In 1702, when Anne came to the throne, neither 
Addison, Steele, Swift, Defoe, nor Pope had attained full 

59 



ree 



60 The Eighteenth Century 

reputation; in 1714, when she died, all five had done 
enough to assure their permanence, and to fix the type of 
literature for which their names collectively stand. Prose 
they had brought to that deliberate, balanced, far from 
passionate form which it was to retain for several genera- 
tions; poetry they had cooled into that rational heroic 
couplet which was to survive in America until the last 
days of Dr. Holmes. They had brought into being mean- 
while a new form of publication, — the periodical, — destined 
to indefinite development. From the time when the first 
Tatler appeared in 1709 to the present day, a consid- 
erable part of our lasting literature has been published in 
periodicals; and periodicals bespeak, before all things 
else, a permanent and increasing hterary public. If any 

Addison. one name can imply all this, it is surely that of the urbane 
Joseph Addison (1672-1719). 

In the middle of the century, when the reign of George 
II was two-thirds over, English literature was producing 
a good many works which have survived. Between 1748 
and 1752, for example, there were published Richardson's 
Clarissa Harlowe, Smollett's Roderick Random and Pere- 
grine Pickle, Thomson's Castle of Indolence, Fielding's 
Tom Jones and Amelia, Johnson's Vanity of Human 
WisJies and a considerable portion of his Rambler, Gray's 
Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and Goldsmith's Life of 
Nash. Sterne's work and Goldsmith's best writing 
came only a little later; and during these same five 
years appeared Wesley's Plain Account of the People 
Called Methodists, Hume's Inquiry into the Human Un- 
derstanding, and his Inquiry concerning the Principles 

The Mid- of Morols and Political Discourses. The last two names 
deserve our notice because Wesley's recalls that strenuous 



Century. 



English Literature — 1700 to 1800 01 

outburst against religious formalism which has bred the 
most potent body of modern English Dissenters, and 
Hume's that rational tendency in philosophy -which during 
the eighteenth century was far more characteristic of 
France than of England. Putting these aside, we may 
find in the literary record of this mid-century a state of 
things somewhat different from that which prevailed 
under Queen Anne. Another considerable form of Eng- 
lish literature had come into existence, — the prose novel, 
whose germs were already evident in the character sketches 
of the Spectator, and in the vivacious incidents of Defoe. 
Poetry, preserving studied correctness of form, was be- 
ginning to tend back toward something more like roman- 
tic sentiment; the prose essay had grown heavier and 
less vital. For the moment the presiding genius of 
English letters was Dr. Samuel Johnson (i 709-1 784), Johnson, 
throughout whose work we can feel that the formalism 
which under Queen Anne had possessed the grace of 
freshness was becoming traditional. In conventional 
good sense his writings, like those which surrounded 
them, remained vigorous; but their vigor was very unlike 
the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of Elizabethan 
letters. 

About twenty-five years later comes a date so memora- 
ble to Americans that a glance at its literary record in 
England can hardly help being suggestive. The year 
from which our national independence is officially dated 
came at the height of Burke's powers, and just between 
Sheridan's Rivals, published the year before, and his School 
for Scandal, of the year after. In the record of English 
publications, 1776 is marked by no important works of 
pure literature; but in that year Hume died, Jeremy Ben- 



62 The Eighteenth Century 

tham published his Fragment on Government, Gibbon 
the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire, Adam Smith his Wealth oj Nations, and Thomas 
Paine his Common Sense; the second edition of the En- 
cyclopedia Britannica, too, appeared in ten volumes. In 
1776, it seems, things literary in England, as well as things 
political in the British Empire, were taking a somewhat 
serious turn. 

In the last ten years of the century, the years when the 
French Revolution was at its fiercest, there appeared in 
England works by Burke and by Mrs. Radchffe, Boswell's 
Johnson, Cowper's Homer, Paine's Rights oj Man, Rog- 
ers's Pleasures 0} Memory, poems by Burns, two or three 
books by Hannah More, the first poems of Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Southey, Scott, and Landor, Godwin's Caleb 
Williams, Lewis's Monk, Miss Burney's Camilla, Roscoe's 
Life oj Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Charles Lamb's Rosa- 
mund Gray. A curious contrast this shows to the state 
of things in contemporary France. Though in political 
matters the French had broken from tradition, their 
literature had to wait thirty years more for liberation 
from the tyranny of conventional form. England mean- 
while, more tenacious of political tradition than ever be- 
fore, had begun to disregard the rigid literary tradition 
which had lasted since the time of Dryden. The Lyrical 
Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, which may be 
regarded in literature as declaring the independence of 
the individual spirit, appeared in 1798, the year when 
Nelson fought the battle of the Nile; but at first they 
made no great impression. Fiction at the same time 
seemed less vital. In the last decade of the eighteenth 
century, though formal tradition was broken, the renewed 



English Literature — 1700 to 1800 63 

strength which was to animate Enghsh Hterature for the 
next thirty years was not yet quite evident. At the 
moment, too, no figure in Enghsh letters had even such 
predominance as that of Addison in Queen Anne's time, 
far less such as Johnson's had been in the later years of 
George 11. Of the elder names mentioned in our last Burke, 
hasty list the most memorable seems that of Edmund 
Burke (1729-1797). 

These names of Addison, Johnson, and Burke prove 
quite as significant of English hterature in the eighteenth 
century as those of Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden proved 
of that literature a century before. Shakspere, Milton, 
and Dryden seem men of three different epochs; at least 
comparatively, Addison, Johnson, and Burke seem men 
of a single type. After all, the mere names tell enough. 
Think of Shakspere and Dryden together, and then of 
Addison and Burke. Think of Milton as the figure who 
intervenes between the first pair, and of Johnson similarly 
intervening between the second. You can hardly fail to 
perceive the trend of English literature. In 1600 it was 
alive with the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and the versa- 
tility of the Ehzabethan spirit. By Dryden's time this 
was already extinct; throughout the century which fol- 
lowed him it showed little symptom of revival. The ro- 
mantic revival which in Burke's time was just beginning, 
had, to be sure, enthusiasm; but this was too conscious to 
seem spontaneous. And although the names of Rogers, 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Landor, and Moore, who 
had all begun writing before 1800, suggest something like 
versatility, it is rather variety. They differ from one 
another, but compared with the Elizabethan poets each 
seems limited, inflexible. Versatihty can hardly be held 



64 The Eighteenth Century 

to characterize any English man of letters who came to 
maturity in the eighteenth century. 

So far as literature is concerned, accordingly, that cen- 
tury seems more and more a period of robustly formal 
tradition; rational, sensible, prejudiced, and toward the 
end restless; admirable and manly in a thousand ways, 
but even further, if possible, from the spontaneous, en- 
thusiastic versatility of Elizabethan days than was the 
period of Dryden. 



Ill 

AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 1700 TO 1800 

References 

General Authorities: Excellent short accounts are Channing, Stu- 
dent's History, 128-314; Thwaites, Colonies, Chapters xi-xiv; Hart, 
Formation of the Union, 1-175. 

Special Works: The authorities mentioned in the brief bibliographies 
at the beginnings of chapters in the books mentioned above, and, for 
minute study, the works referred to in the larger bibliographies mentioned 
below. 

Bibliographies: (banning and Hart, Guide, §§ 131-166; Winsor's 
America, V-VIII. 

In broad outline the history of America during the 
eighteenth century seems as different from that of Eng- 
land as was the case a century earlier. Two facts which we 
remarked in seventeenth-century America remained un- 
changed. In the first place no one really cared much who 
occupied the throne. The question of who was sent out 
as governor of a colony was more important than that 
of who sent him. In the second place, the absorptive 
power of the native American race remained undiminished, 
as indeed it seems still to remain. Though there was 
comparatively less immigration to America in the eight- 
eenth century than in the seventeenth or the nineteenth, 
there was enough to show our surprising power of assimi- 
lation. 

In another aspect, the history of America during the increased 
eighteenth century is unlike that of the century before. ^^^^'^^ 
Until 1700, at least in New England, the dominant Eng- ^^^ state. 

65 



66 The Eighteenth Century 

lish ideal had been rather the moral than the political, — 
the tradition of the English Bible rather than that of the 
Common Law. The fathers of New England had almost 
succeeded in establishing "a theocracy as near as might 
be to that which was the glory of Israel." The story of 
the Mathers shows how this theocratic ambition came to 
grief. Church and State in America tended to separate. 
Once separate, the State was bound to control in public 
affairs ; and so the Church began to decline into formalism. 
The eighteenth century in America, therefore, was one of 
growing material prosperity, under the chief guidance no 
longer of the clergy, but rather of that social class to 
whose commercial energy this prosperity was chiefly due. 
New Eng- Meanwhile throughout the first half of our eighteenth 
j^"^ *" century, external affairs constantly took a pretty definite 
France. form. Increased commercial prosperity and superficial 
social changes could not alter the fact that until the con- 
cjuest of Canada the English colonies in America were 
constantly menaced by those disturbances which tradi- 
tion still calls the French and Indian wars. These began 
before the seventeenth century closed. In 1690 Sir Will- 
iam Phips captured Port Royal, now Annapolis, in Nova 
Scotia; later in the year he came to grief in an expedition 
against Quebec itself; in 1704 came the still remembered 
sack of Deerfield in the Connecticut valley; in 1745 came 
Sir William Pepperell's conquest of Louisbourg; in 1755 
came Braddock's defeat; in 1759 came Wolfe's final con- 
quest at Quebec. When the eighteenth century began, — 
as the encircling names of Quebec, Montreal, Chicago, 
St. Louis, and New Orleans may still remind us, — it was 
doubtful whether the continent which is now the United 
States would ultimately be controlled by the traditions of 



American History— 1700 to 1800 67 

England or by those of continental Europe. Throughout 
the first half of the century this question was still in doubt, 
— never more so, perhaps, than when Braddock fell in 
what is now Western Pennsylvania. The victory on the 
Plains of Abraham settled the fate of a hemisphere. Once 
for all, the continent of America passed into the control of 
the race which still maintains there the traditions of Eng- 
hsh Law. 

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century came 
a movement which throws a good deal of light on Ameri- 
can temperament. The dissenting sect commonly called 
Methodist originated in a fervent evangelical protest 
against the corrupt, unspiritualized condition of the Eng- 
lish Church during the reign of George II. Though 
Methodism made permanent impression on the middle 
class of England, it can hardly be regarded in England 
as a social force of the first historical importance. Nor 
were any of its manifestations there sufficient to attract 
the instant attention of people who now consider general 
English history. In America the case was different. Dur- 
ing the earher years of the eighteenth century the Puritan 
churches had begun to stiffen into formalism. Though 
this never went so far as to divorce religion from life, there 
was such decline of religious fervor as to give the more 
earnest clergy serious ground for alarm. 

In 1738 George Whitefield, perhaps the most powerful 
of English revivalists, first visited the colonies. In that 
year he devoted himself to the spiritual awakening of The Great 
Georgia. In 1740 he came to New England. The -^^^ 
Great Awakening of religion during the next few years 
was largely due to his preaching. At first the clergy were 
disposed ardently to welcome this revival of religious en- 



68 The Eighteenth Century 

thusiasm. Soon, however, the revival took a turn at which 
the more conservative clergy were alarmed; in 1744 Har- 
vard College formally protested against the excesses of 
Whitefield, and in 1745 Yale followed this example. The 
religious enthusiasm which possessed the lower classes of 
eighteenth-century America, in short, grotesquely outran 
the gravely passionate ecstasies of the immigrant Puritans. 
So late as Cotton Mather's time, the devout of New Eng- 
land were still rewarded with mystic visions, wherein 
divine voices and heavenly figures revealed themselves to 
prayerful keepers of fasts and vigils. The Great Awaken- 
ing expressed itself in mad shoutings and tearing off of 
garments. The personal contrast between the immigrant 
Puritans and Whitefield typifies the difference. The old 
ministers had entered on their duties with all the authority 
of degrees from English universities; Whitefield began life 
as a potboy in a tavern. Yet the Great Awakening testifies 
to one lasting fact, — a far-reaching spontaneity and en- 
thusiasm among the humbler classes of America, which, 
once aroused, could produce social phenomena much 
more startling than Methodism produced in King George 
II's England. 

The people who had been so profoundly stirred by this 
Great Awakening were the same who in 1776 declared 
themselves independent of the mother country. The 
The Revo- American Revolution is important enough for separate 
lution. consideration. Before speaking of that, we had best con- 
sider the literary expression of America up to 1776. So, in 
this general consideration of history, we need only recall a 
few dates. The Stamp Act was passed in 1765, the year 
in which Blackstone published the first volume of his 
Commentaries on the Law oj England. Lexington, Con- 



American History — 1700 to ISOO G9 

cord, and Bunker Hill came in 1775, the year in which 
Burke delivered his masterly speech on Conciliation with 
America. On the Fourth of July, 1776, the Declaration 
of Independence was signed. American independence 
was finally acknowledged by the peace of 1783. The 
Constitution of the United States was adopted in 1789. 
In 1800 the presidency of John Adams was drawing to a 
close, and Washington was dead. Now, very broadly 
speaking, the forces which expressed themselves in these 
familiar facts were forces which tended in America to 
destroy the fortunes of established and wealthy people, 
and to substitute as the ruling class throughout the 
country one more like that which had been stirred by 
the Great Awakening. In other words, the Revolution 
once more brought to the surface of American life the sort 
of natives whom the Great Awakening shows so fully to 
have preserved the spontaneity and the enthusiasm of 
earlier days. 

During the eighteenth century, in brief, America seems Develop- 
slowly to have been developing into an independent ™^"V°^ 

-' 10 r American 

nationality as conservative of its traditions as England Nationality. 
was of hers, but less obviously so because American tra- 
ditions were far less threatened. The geographical iso- 
lation of America combined with the absorptive power of 
our native race to preserve the general type of character 
which America had displayed from its settlement. In 
the history of native Americans, the seventeenth century 
has already defined itself as a period of inexperience. The 
fact that American conditions changed so little until the 
Revolution implies that this national inexperience per- 
sisted. In many superficial aspects, no doubt, the native 
Americans of 1776, particularly of the prosperous class, 



70 The Eighteenth Century 

appeared to be men of the eighteenth century. In per- 
sonal temper, however, Thomas Hutchinson and Samuel 
Adams were far more like John Winthrop and Roger 
Williams than Chatham and Burke were like Bacon and 
Lord Burleigh. One inference seems clear: the Ameri- 
cans of the revolutionary period retained to an incalcula- 
ble degree qualities which had faded from ancestral Eng- 
land with the days of Queen Elizabeth. 



IV 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 1700 TO 1776 

References 

General References: On the general course of literature in America 
between 1700 and 1776, see Tyler; for selections, see Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, Vol. II. 

Periodical Publications: See Isaiah Thomas, History oj Printing 
in America, Worcester, 1810; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United 
States jrom 1690 to 1S72, New York: Harper, 1873; Tyler, II, 301-306. 

Woolman: Woolman's Journal, with an introduction by Whittier, 
Boston: Osgood, 1873; on Woolman in general, see Tyler, Lit. Hist. Am. 
Rev., Chapter xxxvii. 

Hutchinson: Of Hutchinson's History oj the Colony 0} Massachu- 
setts-Bay (Vol. I, Boston, 1764; Vol. II, Boston, 1767; Vol. Ill, London, 
1828) the first two volumes have been out of print for over a century, the 
last edition having been published at Salem and Boston in 1795 ; the third 
volume is to be found only in the London edition of 1828. Hutchinson 
also published a Collection 0} Original Papers Relative to the History of 
the Colony 0} Massachusetts-Bay, Boston, 1769. For biography, see P. O. 
Hutchinson, The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchin- 
son, Esq., 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1884-86; J. K. Hosmer, The Life of 
Thomas Hutchinson, Boston: Houghton, 1896. The late Charles Deane 
compiled a Hutchinson bibliography, which was privately printed at 
Boston in 1857; see also, on the bibliography of Hutchinson, Winsor's 
America, III, 344. 

As the material prosperity of America increased, it 
tended to develop the middle colonies; during the greater 
part of the eighteenth century the most important town in 
America was not Boston, but Philadelphia. And though 
in purely religious writing New England kept the lead, 
the centre of its religious thought had shifted from the 
shore of Massachusetts Bay to that of Long Island Sound. 

71 



land 



72 The Eighteenth Century 

Growth of Some familiar dates in the history of American educa- 
Outs^ide^ ^^*^^ emphasize these facts. Yale College, founded in 
New Eng- 1700, began its career under King William III, until 
whose reign the only established school of higher learning 
in America had been Harvard College, founded under 
Charles I. The avowed purpose of the founding of Yale 
was to maintain the orthodox traditions threatened by 
the constantly growing liberalism of Harvard. Under 
George II, three considerable colleges were founded in 
the middle colonies. In 1746, Princeton College w^as es- 
tablished to maintain an orthodoxy as stout as that of 
Yale. In 1749, partly under the auspices of the American 
Philosophical Society which had lately been founded by 
Franklin, the University of Pennsylvania began an aca- 
demic history which more than most in America has kept 
free from entanglement with dogma. In 1754, King's 
College, now Columbia University, was founded at New 
York. Meanwhile Harvard College had done little more 
than preserve its own prudently liberal traditions, with no 
marked alteration in either character or size. The higher 
intellectual activity of America was clearly tending for a 
while to centralize itself elsewhere than in those New 
England regions where the American intellect had first 
been active. 

These two changes, geographical and temperamental, 
may be shown by summarizing the titles of the chief 
American publications, as they are recorded in Whitcomb's 
Chronological Outlines 0} American Literature, during such 
typical periods as 1701-1705, 1731-1735, and 1761-1765. 
Between 1701 and 1705 Whitcomb mentions eighteen 
titles, of which fifteen — ten by the Mathers — belong in 
New England, one in the Middle States, and two in the 



Literature in America — 1700 to 1770 73 

South. Of these three pubhcations outside New England, 
the only one which is now remembered is a History of the 
Present State of Virginia (1705) by Robert Beverley 
(about 1675-17 16). At this period, publication evidently 
centred in New England, and revealed the immense in- 
dustry and influence of the Mathers. And all of Whit- 
comb's eighteen titles fall under our familiar headings of 
(i) Religious writings and (2) Historical writings. 

Between 1731 and 1735 Whitcomb mentions twenty-nine 
titles, of which twenty-five are by known individual writers. 
Of these twenty-five titles, fourteen are from New Eng- 
land and eleven from the Middle and Southern States. 
Again, of these twenty- five titles, only fifteen can be 
brought under the headings of Religion and History, 
which we found to include nearly all the publications of Pubiica 
the seventeenth century and of the first few years of the 
eighteenth. Among the writings between 1731 and 1735 colonies 
which are neither historical nor religious are several which 
cannot possibly be called literature, such as a book about 
the birds of the Carolinas, a spelling-book, and a Hebrew 
grammar. Among the remaining titles are Bachelors^ 
Hall, an imitative poem in couplets, by George Webb; 
Poor Richard's Almanac; Franklin's Essay on Human 
Vanity; and James Logan's Cato's Moral Distichs 
Englished in Couplets. These all came from Philadelphia. 

Between 1761 and 1765, Whitcomb mentions thirty-one 
titles of works by known individual writers; and these 
are almost exactly divided between New England and 
the Middle and Southern colonies. Religion and the 
old-fashioned kind of history include only nine; of those 
remaining, a few are scientific, and one is dramatic, but 
much the greater number — twelve — are, to quote the title 



tion in the 
Middle 



74 The Eighteenth Century 

Political of one of them, Considerations on Behalj 0} the Colonies. 
riting. SQjne of this political writing is in verse ; some of it takes 
the form of the periodical essay. Both essays and verse 
closely imitate earlier English work. 

These few titles show that New England, supreme at 
the beginning of the century, was giving place, as regards 
number of writers, literary feeling, and effort at purely 
literary forms, to the middle colonies. Again, as the cen- 
tury went on the concerns of the State began to seem 
more pressing than those of the Church. Especially the 
problem of independence from Great Britain forced itself 
upon writers and readers alike. The political writing 
which resulted often took the form of light satire, bur- 
lesque, or mock epic. Thus both the form and the sub- 
stance of American writing in the middle of the century 
were less severe than had been the case earlier. We shall 
now look a little more closely at two or three phases of 
writing which illustrate this change. 

During the first half of the eighteenth century there 
had rapidly grown up in America a profusion of periodical 
publications. We had no Tatler, to be sure, or Specta- 
tor; but from 1704, when the Boston News Letter was es- 
Newspapers tablishcd, wc had a constantly increasing number of news- 
Ataanacs Papers. A dozen years before the Revolution these had 
everywhere become as familiar and as popular as were 
those annual almanacs which had already sprung up in 
the seventeenth century, and of which the most highly de- 
veloped example was Franklin's Poor Richard'' s Almanac. 
These indications of every-day reading show that the 
eighteenth century in America was a period of grow- 
ing intellectual activity and curiosity among the whole 
people. 



Literature in America— 1700 to 1776 75 

In the middle colonies there was meanwhile developing 
an aspect of religion very different from that which com- 
mended itself to the orthodox Calvinism of New England. 
Undoubtedly the most important religious writing in Amer- 
ica at the period with which we are now concerned was that 
of Jonathan Edwards. But the memory of another Ameri- 
can, of widely different temper, has tended, during a cen- 
tury and more, to strengthen in the estimation of those 
who love comfortable spiritual thought expressed with 
fervent simphcity. John Woolman (i 720-1 772) was a john 
Quaker farmer of New Jersey, who became an itinerant °° ™*"' 
preacher in 1746, and who began to testify vigorously 
against slavery as early as 1753. It was the Quakers' 
faith that we may save ourselves by voluntarily accept- 
ing Christ, — by willing attention to the still small voice 
of the Holy Spirit. This belief Woolman phrased so 
sweetly and memorably that Charles Lamb advised his 
readers to "get the writings of John Woolman by heart, 
and love the early Quakers." 

Though such writings as Woolman's throw light on a 
growing phase of American sentiment, they were not 
precisely literature. Neither was such political writing 
as we shall consider more particularly when we come to 
the Revolution; nor yet was the more scholarly historical 
writing, of which the principal example is probably the 
History 0} the Colony oj Massachiisets-Bay, by Governor 
Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780). Neglected by rea- Thomas 
son of the traditional unpopularity which sincere, self- 
sacrificing Toryism brought on the author, the last native 
governor of provincial Massachusetts, the book remains 
an admirable piece of serious historical writing, not vivid, 
picturesque, or very interesting, but dignified, earnest, 



76 The Eighteenth Century 

and just. In the history of pure literature, however, it 
has no great importance. 

Further still from pure literature seems the work of the 
two men of this period who for general reasons now deserve 
such separate consideration as we gave Cotton Mather. 
They deserve it as representing two distinct aspects of 
American character, which closely correspond with the 
two ideals most inseparable from our native language. 
One of these ideals is the religious or moral, inherent in 
the lasting tradition of the English Bible; the other is the 
political or social, equally inherent in the equally lasting 
tradition of the English Law. In the pre-revokitionary 
years of our eighteenth century, the former was most char- 
Edwards acteristically expressed by Jonathan Edwards; and the 
FrankUn. ^^^^^ ^f national temper which must always underlie the 
latter was incarnate in Benjamin Franklin. Before 
considering the Revolution and the literature which came 
with it and after it, we may best attend to these men in 
turn. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 

References 

Works: Works, lo vols., New York: Carvill, 1830; Works, 2 vols., 
London: Bohn, 1865. 

Biography and Criticism: A. V. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, Bos- 
ton: Houghton, 1889; S. E. Dwight, The Life 0} President Edwards, New 
York: Carvill, 1830; Holmes, "Edwards," (Works, VIII, 361-401); Sir 
Leslie Stephen, "Edwards," {Hours in a Library, 2d series, Chapter ii, 
London, 1876); Jonathan Edwards, a Retrospect, ed. H. N. Gardiner, 
Boston: Houghton, 1901. 

Bibliography: Allen's Edwards, 391-393. 

Selections: Carpenter, 16-26; Stedman and Hutchinson, II, 373-411. 

Jonathan Edwards was bom at East Windsor, Con- Life, 
necticut, on October 5, 1703. In 1720 he took his degree 
at Yale, where he was a tutor from 1724 to 1726. In 1727 
he was ordained colleague to his grandfather, Solomon 
Stoddard, minister, of Northampton, Massachusetts. 
Here he remained settled until 1750, when his growing 
severity of discipline resulted in his dismissal. The next 
year he became a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, 
in a region at that time remote from civilization. In 1757 
he was chosen to succeed his son-in-law, Burr, as Presi- 
dent of Princeton College. He died at Princeton, in con- 
sequence of inoculation for small-pox, on March 22, 1758. 

Beyond doubt, Edwards has had more influence on 
subsequent thought than any other American theologian. 
In view of this, the uneventfulness of his life, so utterly 
apart from public affairs, becomes significant of the con- 

77 



78 



The Eighteenth Century 



His 

Uncom- 
promising 
Calvinism. 



dition of the New England ministry during his Hfetime. 
He was born hardly two years after Increase Mather, the 
lifelong champion of theocracy, was deposed from the 
presidency of Harvard College; and as our glance at the 
Mathers must have reminded us, an eminent Yankee 
minister of the seventeenth century was almost as neces- 
sarily a politician as he was a divine. Yet Edwards, the 
most eminent of our eighteenth- 
century ministers, had less to do 
with public affairs than many min- 
isters of the present day. A more 
thorough separation of Church and 
State than is indicated by his ca- 
reer could hardly exist. 

Nothing less than such separa- 
tion from public affairs could have 
permitted that concentration on 
matters of the other world which 
makes the work of Edwards still 
d^na^aa Zl^.r^ potent.^ From his own time to 
^ ours his influence has been so 

strong that to this day discussions of him are generally 
concerned with the question of how far his systematic 
theology is true. For our purposes this question is not 
material, nor yet is that of what his system was in detail. 
It is enough to observe that throughout his career, as 
preacher and writer alike, he set forth Calvinism in its 
most uncompromising form, reasoned out with great logi- 
cal power to extreme conclusions. As for matters of 
earthly fact, he mentioned them only as they bore on his 
theological or philosophical contentions. 

Early in life, for example, he fell in love with Sarah 




r 



Jonathan Edwards 79 

Pierrepont, daughter of a New Haven minister, and a sarah 
descendant of the great emigrant minister Thomas Hooker, ^*^"®' 

o o ' pont. 

of Hartford. Accordingly this lady presented herself to 
his mind as surely among God's chosen, an opinion which 
he recorded when she was thirteen years old and he was 
twenty, in the following words : — 

"They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of 
that great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are 
certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other in- 
visible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, 
and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him; 
that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be 
raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured 
that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from Him 
always. There she is to dwell with Him, and to be ravished with His 
love and delight forever. Therefore, if you present all the world be- 
fore her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not 
for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange 
sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most 
just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade 
her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her the whole 
world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of a wonderful 
calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this 
great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes 
go about from place to place singing sweetly; and seems to be always 
full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be 
alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one 
invisible always conversing with her." 

That little record of Edwards's innocent love, which 
felt sure that its object enjoyed the blessings of God's 
elect, has a tender beauty. What tradition has mostly 
remembered of him, however, is rather the vigor with 
which he set forth the inevitable fate of fallen man. 

His most familiar work is the sermon on Sinners in the 



80 The Eighteenth Century 

Sinners in Hauds of Qfi Afigry God, 1 741, of which one of the least 

of\n^" ^ forgotten passages runs thus: — 

^ngry <,q sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great 

furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, 
that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is pro- 
voked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the 
damned in hell: — you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of 
divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it 
and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and 
nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames 
of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, noth- 
ing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment. . . . 
"It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierce- 
ness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must sufTer it 
to all eternity: there will be no end to this exquisite, horrible misery; 
when you look forward you shall see a long forever, a boundless dura- 
tion before you, which will swallow up your thoughts and amaze your 
soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, 
any end, any mitigation, any rest at all; you will know certainly that 
you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling 
and conflicting with this Almighty merciless vengeance; and then, 
when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent 
by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what 
remains." 

His This insistence on sin and its penalty has impressed 

Doctrine, pggple SO deeply that they have been apt to hold it compre- 
hensive of Edwards's theological system. Really this is 
far from the case. He stoutly defended the divine justice 
of his pitiless doctrine, to be sure, with characteristic 
logic : — 

" God is a being infinitely lovely, because he hath infinite excellency 
and beauty. To have infinite excellency and beauty, is the same 
thing as to have infinite loveliness. He is a being of infinite greatness, 
majesty, and glory; and therefore he is infinitely honourable. He is in- 
finitely exalted above the greatest potentates of the earth, and highest 



Jonathan Edwards 81 

angels in heaven; and therefore is infinitely more honourable than 
they. His authority over us is infinite; and the ground of his right 
to our obedience is infinitely strong; for he is infinitely worthy to be 
obeyed in himself, and we have an absolute, universal, and infinite 
dependence upon him. 

"So that sin against God, being a violation of infinite obligations, 
must be a crime infinitely heinous, and so deserving of infinite pun- 
ishment." 

Yet in spite of all this, he held, God now and again, in 
His mercy, is pleased to receive certain human beings 
into the fellowship of the saints, there to enjoy forever 
such peace as he thus describes: — 

"The peace of the Christian infinitely differs from that of the 
worldling, in that it is unfailing and eternal peace. That peace which 
carnal men have in the things of this world is, according to the foun- 
dation it is built upon, of short continuance; hke the comfort of a 
dream, I John ii, 17, i Cor. vii, 31. These things, the best and most 
durable of them, are like bubbles on the face of the water; they 
vanish in a moment, Hos. x, 7. 

"But the foundation of the Christian's peace is everlasting; it is 
what no time, no change, can destroy. It will remain when the body 
dies; it will remain when the mountains depart and the hills shall be 
removed, and when the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll. 
The fountain of his comfort shall never be diminished, and the stream 
shall never be dried. His comfort and, joy is a living spring in the 
soul, a well of water springing up to everlasting life. " 

In plain truth, what people commonly remember of Edwards 
Edwards is merely one extreme to which he reasoned out ^^l^l^^ 
his consistent system. Like the older theology of Calvin ofthewiii. 
it all rests on the essential wickedness of the human will, 
concerning which Edwards's great treatise on the Freedom 
0} the Will, 1754, is still significant. He asserts something 
like an utter fatalism, a universality of cause affecting even 
our volition, quite beyond human control. This fatal 



82 The Eighteenth Century 

perversion of human will he beheves to spring from that 
ancestral curse which forbids any child of Adam to exert 
the will in true harmony with the will of God. Reconcili- 
ation he holds possible only when divine power comes, 
with unmerited grace, to God's elect. 

Edwards's premises lead pretty straight to his conclu- 
sions. Yet it is hardly too much to say that neither seem 
quite convincing to most modern minds. One can see 
Summary, why. In his American world, so relieved from the pressure 
of external fact that people generally behaved much better 
than is usual in earthly history, Edw^ards, whose personal 
life was exceptionally removed from anything practical, 
reasoned out with unflinching logic, to extreme conclu- 
sions, a kind of philosophy which is justified in experience 
only by such things as occur in densely populated, corrupt 
societies. He tried logically to extend Calvinism in a 
world where there were few more dreadful exhibitions of 
human depravity than occasional cheating, the reading of 
eighteenth-century novels, and such artless merry- 
makings as have always gladdened youth in the Yankee 
country. Whoever knew American hfe in the middle of 
the eighteenth century and honestly asked himself whether 
its manifestations were such as the theology of Edwards 
would explain, could hardly avoid a deeper and deeper 
conviction that, even though he was unable to find a flaw 
in Edwards's system, the whole thing was hardly in ac- 
cordance with fact. 



VI 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

References 

Works: Works, lo vols., ed. Jared Sparks, Boston: Hilliard, Gray & 
Co., 1836-50; *Works, 10 vols., ed. John Bigelow, New York: Putnam, 
1887-8; * Autobiography, 3 vols., ed. Bigelow, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 
1875. 

Biography and Criticism: J. T. Morse, Jr., Benjamin Franklin, 
Boston: Houghton, 1889 (as); *J. B. McMaster, Benjamin Franklin, 
Boston, Houghton, 1887 (aml); P. L. Ford, The Many-Sided Franklin, 
New York: Century Co., 1899. 

Bibliography: P. L. Ford, Franklin Bibliography, Brooklyn, 1889. 

Selections: Carpenter, 31-47; Duyckinck, I, 110-115; Griswold, 
Prose, 63-70; *Hart, Contemporaries, II, Nos. 68, 81, 94, 133, 143, 199, 
217, and III, No. 12; *Stedman and Hutchinson, III, 3-49. 

The contemporary of Edwards who best shows what 
American human nature had become, is Benjamin 
Franklin (1706- 1790). Unlike the persons at whom we 
have glanced, this man, who became more eminent than all 
the rest together, sprang from inconspicuous origin. The 
son of a tallow chandler, he was born in Boston, on Jan- 
uary 6, 1706. As a mere boy, he was apprenticed to his 
brother, a printer, with whom he did not get along very 
well. At seventeen he ran away, and finally turned up in Life. 
Philadelphia, where he attracted the interest of some in- 
fluential people. A year later he went to England, carry- 
ing from these friends letters which he supposed might 
be useful in the mother country. The letters proved 
worthless; in 1726, after a rather vagabond life in Eng- 

83 



84 



The Eighteenth Century 



Poor 

Richard's 

Almanac. 



land, he returned to Philadelphia. There he remained 
for some thirty years. He began by shrewdly advancing 
himself as printer, publisher, and shopkeeper; later, when 
his extraordinary ability had drawn about him people of 
more and more solid character, he became a local public 
man and proved himself also an admirable self-taught 
man of science. In 1732, the year of Washington's birth, 

he started that Poor Richard'' s 
Almanac whose aphorisms 
have remained so popular. It 
is Poor Richard who tells us, 
among other things, that 
"Early to bed and early to 
rise, makes a man healthy, 
wealthy, and wise;" that "God 
helps them that help them- 
selves;" and that "Honesty is 
the best pohcy." After fifteen 
years Franklin's affairs had 
so prospered that he could 
retire from shopkeeping and 
give himself over to scientific work. He made numerous 
inventions: the lightning-rod, for example; the stove still 
called by his name; and double spectacles, with one lens 
in the upper half for observing distant objects, and another 
in the lower half for reading. In 1755 he was made Post- 
master-General of the iVmerican colonies; and the United 
States post-office is said still to be conducted in many 
respects on the system he then established. So he lived 
until 1757, the year before Jonathan Edwards died. 

In 1757 he was sent to England as the Agent of Pennsyl- 
vania. There he remained, with slight intervals, for elgh- 




Benjamin Franklin 85 

teen years, becoming agent of other colonics too. In 1775 
he returned home, where in 1776 he was a signer of the 
Declaration of Independence. Before the end of that 
year he was despatched as minister to France, where he 
remained until 1 785. Then he came home and was elected 
President of Pennsylvania. In 1787 he was among the 
signers of the Constitution of the United States. On the 
17th of April, 1790, he died at Philadelphia, a city to which 
his influence had given not only the best municipal system 
of eighteenth-century America, but also, among other in- 
stitutions which have survived, the American Philosophical 
Society and the University of Pennsylvania. 

The Franklin of world tradition, the great Franklin, is 
the statesman and diplomatist who from 1757 until 1785 
proved himself both in England and in France to possess 
such remarkable power. But the Franklin with whom 
we are concerned is rather the shrewd native American Develop 
whose first fifty years were spent in preparation for his 
world-wide career. The effect of his inconspicuous origin 
appeared in several ways. For one thing he had small 
love for anything in Massachusetts; for another, he in- 
stinctively emigrated to a region where he should not be 
hampered by troublesome family traditions; for a third, 
he consorted during his earlier life with men who though 
often clever were loose in morals. Before middle life, 
however, his vagabond period was at an end. By strict 
attention to business and imperturbable good sense, he 
steadily bettered his condition. By the time he was fifty 
years old his studies in electricity had gained him Euro- 
pean reputation; and in all the American colonies there 
was no practical public man of more deserved local im- 
portance. 



ment of 
Character. 



86 The Eighteenth Century 

In the course of these years he had written and pubHshed 
copiously. None of his work, however, can be called 
exactly literary. Its purpose was either to instruct people 
concerning his scientific and other discoveries and prin- 
ciples; or else, as in Poor Richard^ s Almanac, — perhaps 
his nearest approach to pure letters, — to influence conduct. 
But if Franklin's writings were never precisely literature, 
his style was generally admirable. His account in the 
Autobiography of how, while still a Boston boy, he learned 
to write, is at once characteristic of his temper and con- 
clusive of his accomplishment: — 

"About this time I met with an odd volume of the 'Spectator.' 
It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, 
read it over and over, and was much dehghted with it. I thought 
the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this 
view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the senti- 
ment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without 
looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing 
each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed 
before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I 
compared my ' Spectator ' with the original, discovered some of my 
faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, 
or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I 
should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making 
verses ; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, 
but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for 
the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of search- 
ing for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, 
and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and 
turned them into verse ; and, after a time, when I had pretty well for- 
gotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled 
my collection of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeav- 
oured to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the 
full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method 
in the arrangement of thoughts. My time for these exercises and for 



Benjamin Franklin 87 

reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or 
on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evad- 
ing as much as I could the common attendance on public worship 
which my father used to exact of me when I was under his care, and 
which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed 
to me, afford time to practise it." 

Sound eighteenth-century EngHsh this, though hardly reeling 
equal to its model. Even more characteristic than the reUgion. 
English of this passage, however, is Franklin's feeling 
about religion, implied in its last sentence. The Boston 
where this printer's boy stayed away from church to teach 
himself how to write was the very town where Increase 
and Cotton Mather were still preaching the dogmas of 
Puritan theocracy; and a few days' journey westward 
Jonathan Edwards, only three years older than Franklin, 
was beginning his lifelong study of the relation of man- 
kind to eternity. To the religious mind of New England, 
earthly life remained a mere fleeting moment. Life must 
always end soon, and death as we see it actually seems 
unending. With this solemn truth constantly in mind, 
the New England Puritans of Franklin's day, like their 
devout ancestors, and many of their devout descendants, 
bent their whole energy toward eternal welfare as dis- 
tinguished from anything temporal. Yet in their prin- 
cipal town Franklin, a man of the plain people, exposed 
to no influences but those of his own day and country, 
was coolly preferring the study of earthly accomplishment 
to any question which concerned matters beyond human 
life. 

Another extract from his Autobiography carries his re- 
ligious history a little further: — 

"My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought 
me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was 



88 The Eighteenth Century 

scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I 
found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of 
Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands; 
they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's 
Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite con- 
trary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the deists, 
which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than 
the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist. My argu- 
ments perverted some others, particularly Collins and Ralph; but, 
each of them having afterward wrong'd me greatly without the least 
compunction, and recollecting Keith's conduct towards me (who was 
another free-thinker), and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, 
which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this 
doctrine, tho' it might be true, was not very useful." 

"Not very useful:" the good sense of Franklin tested 
religion itself by its effects on every-day conduct. 

The cool scientific temper with which he observed one 
of Whitefield's impassioned public discourses is equally 
characteristic: — 

"He preach'd one evening from the top of the Court-house steps, 
which are in the middle of Market-street, and on the west side of 
Second-street, which crosses it at right angles. Both streets were 
filled with hearers to a considerable distance. Being among the hind- 
most in Market-street, I had the curiosity to learn how far he could 
be heard by retiring backwards down the street towards the river ; 
and I found that his voice was distinct till I came near Front-street, 
when some noise in that street obscur'd it. Imagining then a semi- 
circle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were 
filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I 
computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. 
This reconcil'd me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached 
to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to ancient histories 
of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes 
doubted." 

To Franklin, in brief, things on earth were of paramount 
importance. He never denied the existence of God, but 



Benjamin Franklin 89 

he deemed God a beneficent spirit, to whom men, if they 
behave decently, may confidently leave the affairs of an- 
other world. Of earthly morality, meanwhile, so far as 
it commended itself to good sense, Franklin was shrewdly 
careful. No passage in his Autobiography (1771, 1781, Ruiesof 
1788) is more familiar than the list of virtues which he 
drew up and endeavored in turn to practise. The order 
in which he chose to arrange them is as follows: Tem- 
perance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality (under 
which his little expository motto is very characteristic: 
"Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself"), 
Industry, Sincerity (under which he directs us to "Use 
no hurtful deceit"), Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, 
Tranquillity, Chastity, and finally one which he added 
later as peculiarly needful to him, — Humility. 

The deliberate good sense with which Franklin treated 
matters of religion and morality, he displayed equally in 
his scientific writings; and, a little later, in the public 
documents and correspondence which made him as emi- 
nent in diplomacy and statecraft as he had earlier been in 
science and in local affairs. His examination before the 
House of Commons in 1766 shows him as a public man at 
his best. 

A letter to a London newspaper, written the year be- 
fore, shows another phase of his mind, less frequently 
remembered. It is a bantering comment on ignorant arti- 
cles concerning the American colonies which appeared 
at about this time in the daily prints : — 

"I beg leave to say, that all the articles of news that seem improb- Humor, 
able are not mere inventions. The very tails of the American sheep 
are so laden with wool, that each has a little car or wagon on four little 
wheels, to support and keep it from trailing on the ground. Would 



90 The Eighteenth Century 

they caulk their ships, would they even litter their horses with wool, 
if it were not both plenty and cheap? And what signifies the dear- 
ness of labor when an English shilling passes for five-and-twenty? 
Their engaging three hundred silk throwsters here in one week for 
New York was treated as a fable, because, forsooth, they have ' no 
silk there to throw. ' Those, who make this objection, perhaps do not 
know, that, at the same time the agents from the King of Spain were 
at Quebec to contract for one thousand pieces of cannon to be made 
there for the fortification of Mexico, and at New York engaging the 
usual supply of woollen floor carpets for their West India houses, 
other agents from the Emperor of China were at Boston treating 
about an exchange of raw silk for wool, to be carried in Chinese junks 
through the Straits of Magellan. 

"And yet all this is as certainly true, as the account said to be 
from Quebec, in all the papers of last week, that the inhabitants of 
Canada are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery ' this 
summer in the upper Lakes.' Ignorant people may object, that the 
upper Lakes are fresh, and that cod and whales are salt-water fish; but 
let them know. Sir, that cod, like other fish when attacked by their 
enemies, fly into any water where they can be safest; that whales, 
when they have a mind to eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; 
and that the grand leap of the whale in the chase up the Falls of 
Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest 
spectacles in nature." 

This passage is noteworthy as an early instance of what 
we now call American humor, — the grave statement, with 
a sober face, of obviously preposterous nonsense. Though 
its style is almost Addisonian, its substance is more like 
what in our own days has given world-wide popularity to 
Mark Twain. 
Summary. The character of Franklin is too considerable for ade- 
quate treatment in any such space as ours; but perhaps 
we have seen enough to understand how human nature 
tended to develop in eighteenth-century America, where 
for a time economic and social pressure was so relaxed. 



Benjamin Franhlin 91 

Devoting himself with unceasing energy, common-sense, 
and tact to practical matters, and never seriously con- 
cerning himself with eternity, Franklin developed into a 
living example of such rational, kindly humanity as the 
philosophy of revolutionary France held attainable by 
whoever should be freed from the distorting influence 
of accidental and outworn institutions. In Jonathan 
Edwards we found theoretical Puritanism proclaiming 
more uncompromisingly than ever that human nature is 
totally depraved. At that very time Franklin, by Hving 
as well and as sensibly as he could, was getting himself 
ready to face the eternities, feeling, as he wrote to Pres- 
ident Stiles, that "having experienced the goodness of 
that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long 
life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though 
without the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness." 
The America which in the same years bred Jonathan 
Edwards and Benjamin Franklin bred too the American 
Revolution. 



VII 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

References 

(a) HISTORY 

Good Short Accounts: Channing, Student's History, Chapters iv 
and V. Note the bibliographical references at the beginning of each 
chapter, and especially the lists of "Illustrative Material." 

Hart, Formation of the Union, Chapters i, iii, iv. Bibliographical lists 
at the beginning of each chapter. 

Bibliography: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 56a, 56b, 133-136; 
Justin Winsor, The Reader's Handbook oj the American Revolution (1761- 
1783), Boston: Houghton, 1880; Winsor's America, Vols. VI and VII. 
Vol. VIII (p. 469 ff.) contains a very full list of "Printed Authorities on 
the History of the United States, 1 775-1850." 

{b) LITERATURE 

Literary History: The great book on the literature of the Revolu- 
tionary period is M. C. Tyler's Literary History oj the American Revolu- 
tion, 2 vols., New York: Putnam, 1897. Whoever cannot read all of 
Tyler may well select Chapters i, x § vi, xiii, xv, xxi, xxv, xxvi, xxix. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, II, Parts vi-viii, especially Nos. 
131, 149, 167, 196; Stedman and Hutchinson, Vol. Ill, especially pp. 
91-98, 113-116, 175-180, 186-205, 218-219, 236-251, 338-361. 

The war which began at Lexington and ended six 
years later with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown 
has too often been considered a rising against a foreign 
invader. No error could be much graver. Up to 1760 
the colonies of America were on the whole loyal to the 
crown of England. England, of course, was separated 
from America by the Atlantic Ocean; and, so far as time 
goes, the North Atlantic of the eighteenth century was 
wider than the equatorial Pacific is to-day. But the peo- 

92 



The American Revolution 93 

pie of the American colonies were as truly compatriots of 
Englishmen as the citizens of our Southern States in i860 
were compatriots of New England Yankees. The Revo- 
lution, in short, was a civil war, like the wars of Cavaliers 
and Roundheads a century before in England, or the 
war in our own country between 1861 and 1865. And 
like most civil wars it was partly due to honest misunder- 
standing. The two sides used the same terms in dispute, 
but they applied them to widely different things. 

Take, for example, one of the best-remembered phrases England 
of the period,— "No taxation without representation." coh)nk^s 
What does this really mean ? To the American mind of misunder- 
to-day, as to the mind of the revolutionary leaders in King other. 
George's colonies, it means that no town or city or other 
group of men should be taxed by a legislative body to 
which it has not actually elected representatives, gen- 
erally resident within its limits. To the Enghsh mind of 
1770, on the other hand, it simply meant that no British 
subject should be taxed by a body where there was not 
somebody to represent his case. This view, the traditional 
one of the English Common Law, was held by the Loyalists 
of America. When the revolutionists complained that 
America elected no representatives to Parliament, the 
loyahsts answered that neither did many of the most popu- 
lous towns in the mother country; and that the interests 
of those towns were perfectly well cared for by members 
elected elsewhere. If anybody inquired what members 
of Parliament were protecting the interests of the American 
colonies, the loyalists would have named the elder Pitt, 
Fox, and Burke, and would have asked whether New 
England or Virginia could have exported to Parliament 
representatives in any respect superior. 



94 The Eighteenth Century 

So it was in regard to other important questions of gov- 
ernment: Englishmen and Americans in 1775 were hon- 
estly unable to understand one another. The reason for 
this disagreement was that by 1775 the course of Ameri- 
can history had made our conception of legal rights dif- 
ferent from that of the English. 

We had developed local traditions of our own, which 
we believed as immemorial as ever were the local tradi- 
tions of the mother country. The question of represen- 
tation, for example, was not abstract; it was one of estab- 
lished constitutional practice, which had taken one form 
in England and another very different form in America. 
So when discussion arose. Englishmen meant one thing 
by "representation" and Americans meant something else. 
Misunderstanding followed, a family quarrel, a civil war, 
and world disunion. Beneath this world disunion, all the 
while, is a deeper fact, binding America and England 
truly together at heart, — each really believed itself to be as- 
serting the rights which immemorial custom had sanc- 
tioned. 
The Rea- We Can now perhaps begin to see what the American 
thilMis- Revolution means. By 1775, the national experience 
under- whicli had been accumulating in England from the days 
of Queen Elizabeth had brought the temper of the native 
English to a state very remote from what this native tem- 
per had been under the Tudor sovereigns. Meanwhile, 
the lack of economic pressure to which we have given the 
name of national inexperience had kept the original Ameri- 
can temper singularly unaltered. When at last, on the 
accession of George III, legal and constitutional questions 
were presented in the same terms to English-speaking 
temperaments on different sides of the Atlantic, these tem- 



The American Revolution 95 

peraments had been forced so far apart that neither could 
appreciate what each other meant. So neither would have 
been true to the deepest traditions of their common race, 
had anything less than the Revolution resulted. 

This deep national misunderstanding naturally gave Nine Sorts 
rise to a great deal of publication. Most of this was "Jtl^nYr' 
controversial, and of no more than passing interest. Yet Literature, 
no consideration of literature in America can quite neglect 
it. Professor Tyler, who has studied this subject more 
thoroughly than anyone else — and who uses the term 
"Hterature" so generously as to include within it the Dec- 
laration of Independence, divides the literature of the 
Revolution into nine classes:* correspondence, state 
papers, oral addresses, political essays, political satires in 
verse, lyric poetry, minor literary facetiae, drama, and 
prose narratives of experience. Most of this publication 
we may put aside once for all; it is only material for 
history. But we may wisely glance at a few of the better 
written works such as the political essays of James Otis, 
John Dickinson, and Francis Hopkinson, on the one 
side; and those of Samuel Seabury, and the satires in 
verse of Jonathan Odell, on the other. 

James Otis (i 725-1 783), of Massachusetts, whose otis. . 
famous speech in 1761 against "writs of assistance" was 
based rather upon precedent than upon abstract rights, 
pubHshed in 1764 a pamphlet called The Rights oj the 
Colonies Asserted and Proved. In this essay Otis declared 
that "by the law of God and nature" the colonists were 
entitled to all the rights of their fellow- subjects in Great 
Britain. Again, in 1765, Otis's famous Considerations 

♦M.C.Tyler, The Literary History o} the American Revolution,!, 
9-29. 



96 The Eighteenth Century 

on Behalf of the Colonies, in a Letter to a Noble Lord, 
attacked the English idea of virtual representation and 
declared that the mother country should keep the colo- 
nies by nourishing them as the apple of her eye, Otis's 
writings show the temper of an advocate, trained in the 
English law, but so eagerly interested in his cause as to 
be less and less careful about precedent. 

Dickin- John Dickinson (i 732-1808), of Philadelphia, is best 

^°"" known by his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to 

the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1767). They are 
said to have gone through thirty editions in six months. 
The main object of these pamphlets, which were among 
the most influential of the period, was, in Dickinson's own 
words, "to convince the people of these colonies that 
they are, at this moment, exposed to the most imminent 
dangers; and to persuade them, immediately, vigorously, 
and unanimously, to exert themselves, in the most firm 
but most peaceable manner, for obtaining relief." 

Hopkinson. Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), also of Philadelphia, 
was perhaps the most distinctly American writer of all. 
He had been in England between 1766 and 1768. He 
was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he 
died a United States District Judge. His only popular 
work is a poem — the Battle of the Kegs (1778) — which 
ridiculed the British army when it occupied Philadelphia. 
But some of his prose writings during the Revolutionary 
period show that he felt, as distinctly as people feel to- 
day, how widely the national temperaments of England 
and of America had diverged. 

Bishop Among the Loyalist writers who opposed the doctrines 

of such men as the foregoing, one of the most conspicuous 
was Samuel Seabury (i 729-1 796), of Connecticut, later 



Seabury. 



The Ainerican Revolution 97 

the first bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 
the United States. Under the name of a "Westchester 
Farmer," he wrote a brilhant series of pamphlets (1774- 
1775), which shrewdly pointed out the misfortunes which 
must ensue from some of the acts of the first Continental 
Congress. 

Nearer to pure literature, was the work of the Rev. odeii. 
Jonathan Odell (i 737-1818), of New Jersey, whose 
satires in verse, The Word 0} Congress, The Congratula- 
tion, The Feu de Joie, and The American Times, all pub- 
hshed in 17 79-1 780, ridiculed the Revolutionists in the 
manner of the Enghsh satirist Charles Churchill (1731- 
1764). 

This eager controversial writing of the Revolution is of 
great historical interest. Professor Tyler sets it forth 
with a minuteness and impartiality which give his volumes 
on the period a value almost equal to that of the innu- 
merable documents on which they are based. In a study 
like ours, which is chiefly concerned with pure literature, 
however, little of this work seems positively memorable. 
Decidedly more memorable we shall find the American 
writings of the years which followed. 



VIII 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 1776 TO 1800 

References 
the federalist 

Works: *The Federalist, ed. P. L. Ford, New York: Holt, 1898; Ham- 
ilton's Works, ed. H. C. Lodge, 9 vols., New York: Putnam, 1885; 
Madison Papers, 3 vols., Washington: Langtree & O'Sullivan, 1840; 
Madison's Letters and Other Writings, 4 vols., Philadelphia: Lippincott, 
1865; Jay's Correspondence and Public Papers, 4 vols., New York: Put- 
nam, 1890-93. 

Biography and Criticism: H. C. Lodge, Alexander Hamilton, Bos- 
ton: Houghton, 1882 (as); *J. T. Morse, Jr., The Life 0} Alexander 
Hamilton, 2 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1876; *W. C. Rives, Jr., 
History oj the Life and Times of James Madison, 3 vols., Boston: Little, 
Brown & Co., 1859; S. H. Gay, James Madison, Boston: Houghton, 
1884 (as); William Jay, Life 0/ John Jay, New York: J. & J. Harper, 
1833; *George Pellew, John Jay, Boston: Houghton, 1890 (as); E. G. 
Bourne, Essays in Historical Criticism, New York: Scribner, 1901, pp. 

113-156. 

Bibliography: *P. L. Ford, Bibliotheca Hamiltoniana, New York, 
1886; Winsor' s ^werfca, VII, 259-260; Channing and Hart, Guide, § 155. 

Selections: Griswold, Prose, 93-95; Hart, Contemporaries, II, Nos. 
173, 190, and III, Nos. 54, 72, 86; Stedman and Hutchinson, III, 432- 
441 and IV, 110-127. 

HARTFORD WITS 

Works: None in print. The Miscellaneous Works of David Hum- 
phreys were published at New York in 1790; the Poetical Works 0} John 
Trumbull, LL.D., in two volumes, appeared at Hartford in 1820. 

Biography and Criticism: C. B. Todd, Life and Letters oj Joel Bar- 
low, New York: Putnam, 1895; F. Sheldon, "The Pleiades of Connecti- 
cut," Atlantic Monthly, XV, 187 fl. (Feb., 1865); *M. C. Tyler, Three 
Men of Letters [Berkeley, Dwight, Barlow], New York: Putnam, 1895; 
*Tyler, Lit. Hist. Am. Rev., I, 187-221, 427-450; J. H. Trumbull, "The 
Origin of M'Fingal," The Historical Magazine, January, 1868. 



Literature in America — 1776 to 1800 99 

Bibliography: Tyler, Lit. Hist. Am. Rev., II, 429 ff; Tyler, Three 
Men of Letters, 181-185. 

Selections: Duyckinck, I, 312-319, 362-365, 398-403; Griswold, 
Poetry, 42-47, 49-54, 59-63; Griswold, Prose, 82-84; Hart, Contempora- 
ries, II, Nos. 164, 200, and III, No. 153; Stedman, 9-10; *Stedman and 
Hutchinson, III, 403-415, 422-429, 463-483, and IV, 46-57, 89-92, 
167-168. 

. FRENEAU 

Works : The Poems 0} Philip Frencau, ed. F. L. Pattee, 2 vols., Prince- 
ton, 1902-03. 

Biography and Criticism: Mary S. Austin, Philip Freneau: A History 
of His Life and Times, New York: A. Wessels Co., 1901; S. E. Forman, 
The Political Activities of Philip Freneau, Baltimore, 1902 (Johns Hop- 
kins University Studies, Series XX, Nos. 9-10); *Tyler, Lit. Hist. Am. 
Rev., I, 171-183, 413-425, and II, 246-276. 

Bibliogr.4PHy: Foley, 98-100; V. H. Paltsits, A Bibliography of the 
Separate and Collected Works of Philip Freneati, NewYorh: Dodd, Mead 
& Co., 1903. 

Selections: Duyckinck, I, 336-348; Griswold, Poets, 35-39; Stedman, 
3-8; *Stedraan and Hutchinson, III, 445-457. 

Between the close of the Revolution and the beginning 
of the nineteenth century, our newly independent country 
was adrift; the true course of our national hfe was slow 
in declaring itself. Until the very end of the eighteenth 
century, we accordingly remained without a lasting lit- 
erature. But, like the earlier period, that last quarter 
of this eighteenth century produced a good deal of pub- 
lication at which we must glance. 

Our public men, Hamilton, Samuel Adams, Jefferson, writings of 
Gouverneur Morris, John Adams, Madison, Jay, and 
others, wrote admirably. They were earnest and thought- 
ful; they had strong common sense; they were far-sighted 
and temperate; and they expressed themselves with that 
dignified urbanity which in their time marked the English 
of educated people. In purely literary history, however, 
they can hardly be regarded as much more important 



American 
Statesmen. 



100 The Eighteenth Century 

than Sir William Blackstone (i 723-1 780) is in the literary 
history of England. 

This kind of American writing reached its acme in 1787 
and 1788, when Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay sup- 
ported the still unaccepted Constitution of the United 
States in a remarkable series of political essays, named the 
Federalist. As a series of formal essays, the Federalist 
groups itself roughly with the Taller, the Spectator, and 
those numerous descendants of theirs which fill the literary 
records of eighteenth-century England. It differs, however, 
from most of these, in both substance and purpose. The 
Taller, the Spectator, and the best of their successors, dealt 
with superficial matters in a spirit of good-natured reproof: 
the Federalist deals, in an argumentative spirit as earnest 
as that of any Puritan divine, with great political prin- 
ciples; and it is so wisely thoughtful that one may almost 
declare it the permanent basis of sound thinking concern- 
ing American constitutional law. Like all the educated 
writing of the eighteenth century, too, it is phrased 
with a rhythmical balance and urbane polish which give 
it claim to literary distinction. After all, however, one 
can hardly feel it much more significant in a history 
of pure letters than are the opinions in which a little 
later Judge Marshall and Judge Story developed and 
expounded the constitutional law which the Federalist 
did so much to establish. Its true character appears when 
we remember the most important thing published in Eng- 
land during the same years, — the poetry of Robert Burns. 
The contrast between Burns and the Federalist tells the 
whole Hterary story. Just as in the seventeenth century 
the only serious literature of America was a phase of that 
half-historical, half- theological work which had been a 



Literature in America — 1770 to 1800 101 

minor part of English literature generations before; so in 
the eighteenth century the chief product of American 
literature was an extremely mature example of such po- 
litical pamphleteering as in England had been a minor 
phase of letters during the period of Queen Anne. Pure 
letters in America were still to come. 

Even during the seventeenth century, however, as we 
saw in our glance at the " Tenth Muse," Mrs. Anne Brad- 
street, there had been in America sporadic and consciously 
imitative efforts to produce something literary. So there 
were during the eighteenth century. We had sundry 
writers of aphoristic verse remotely following the tradition 
of Pope; and we had satire, modelled on that of Charles 
Churchill, a temporarily popular English writer. This 
did not satisfy our growing national ambition. Toward 
the end of the century, a little group of clever and enthu- 
siastic men made a serious attempt to establish a vigorous Efforts to 
native literature ; and though the results of this effort were ^^*^^.''^'^ 

' o a Wative 

neither excellent nor permanent, the effort was earnest Literature, 
and characteristic enough to deserve attention. 

To understand its place in our literary records we must 
recall something of our intellectual history. This may be 
said to have begun with the foundation of Harvard College 
in 1636. Throughout the seventeenth century. Harvard, 
then the only school of the higher learning in America, 
remained the only organized centre of American intellec- 
tual life. Cotton IMather, we remember, was a Harvard 
graduate, a member of the Board of Overseers and of 
the Corporation, and an eager aspirant for the presidency 
of the college. Long before his busy life was ended, how- 
ever. Harvard had swerved from the old Puritan traditon; 
and Yale College, the stronghold of New England ortho^ 



102 



The Eighteenth Century 



Ilev/ 

England no 
longer the 
Centre of 
Letters. 



Dwight. 



doxy, had consequently been established in New Haven. 
It was from Yale that Jonathan Edwards graduated. 
The fact that the centre of American intellectual life was 
no longer on the shores of Boston Bay was again attested 
by the career of Franklin, who, though born in Boston, 
lived mostly in what was then the principal city of Amer- 
ica, — Philadelphia. In what we said of the Federalist, 
too, the same trend was implied. 
Boston bred revolutionary worthies, 
of course: James Otis was a Mas- 
sachusetts man; so were John 
and Samuel Adams ; so earlier was 
Thomas Hutchinson; so later was 
Fisher Ames. But of the chief 
writers of the Federalist, Hamilton 
k and Jay were from New York; and 
Madison was one of that great 
school of Virginia public men 
i^^:^^^^ which included Patrick Henry, and 
^ Jefferson, and Washington, and 

Marshall, and many more. In the American perspective of 
the eighteenth century. Eastern Massachusetts does not 
loom so large in the foreground as Massachusetts tra- 
dition would have us believe. 

So it is not surprising that the highest literary activity 
of the later eighteenth century in America was started at 
Yale College. The most eminent of the men of letters 
who developed there was Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), 
a grandson of Jonathan Edwards. He took his degree 
in 1769, and remained a tutor at Yale until 1777. He 
then became for a year a chaplain in the Continental 
Army. While tutor at Yale he co-operated with his col- 




/^7:y2^- 



and Poems. 



Literature in A merica — 1 770 to 1800 103 

league, John Trumbull, in the production of some con- 
ventional essays modelled on the Spectator. While chap- 
lain in the army he wrote a popular song entitled Columbia. 
Of this the last of its six stanzas is a sufficient example; 
the tinal couplet repeats the opening words of the poem: — 

"Thus, as down a lone valley, with cedars o'erspread, 
From war's dread confusion I pensively strayed— 
The gloom from the face of fair heaven retired ; 
The winds ceased to murmur; the thunders expired; 
Perfumes, as of Eden, flowed sweetly along, 
And a voice, as of angels, enchantingly sung : 
' Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, 
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies.'" 

In 1783 Dwight became minister of Greenfield, Con- His Travels 
necticut. In 1795 he was made President of Yale College, 
an office which he held to his death in 181 7. As President, 
he wrote his posthumously published Travels in New Eng- 
land and New York (1821-22), which record experiences 
during a number of summer journeys and remain an au- 
thority on the condition of those regions during his time. 
He did some sound work in theology too; but by this time 
Calvinistic theology belongs apart from pure letters even in 
America. In 1788, however, he published some of his 
ecclesiastical views in an anonymous poem entitled The 
Triumph 0} Infidelity, which expresses vigorous theologic 
conservatism in the traditional manner of the early Eng- 
lish eighteenth-century satires. Dwight also wrote a 
poem called Greenfield Hill (1794), which is long, tedious, 
formal, and turgid ; but indicates, like the good President's 
travels, that he was touched by a sense of the beauties of 
nature in his native country. 

Toward the end of the century the literary group of 



104 



The Eighteenth Century 



The 

"Hartford 

Wits." 



John 
Trumbull. 



which President Dwight is the most memorable figure 
developed into a recognized little company, designated 
as the "Hartford Wits"; for most of them, though gradu- 
ates of Yale, lived at one time or another in the old capital 
of colonial Connecticut. The chief of these "Hartford 
Wits " vv^ere John Trumbull and Joel Barlov^. 

John Trumbull (i 750-1831), on the whole the more 
important, graduated at Yale in 1767. In 1769 he co-oper- 
ated with Dwight in pubHshing that series of essays in the 
manner of the Spectator. From 1771 to 1773 he was a 
tutor at Yale ; afterwards he practised law in New Haven 
and Boston; and in 1781 he went to Hartford, where he 
remained as lawyer and later as Judge of the Supreme 
Court until 1819. From 1825 until his death in 1831 he 
lived at Detroit in Michigan. Trumbull's principal works 
are two long poems in the manner of Butler's Hudibras 
(1663-1678). The first, entitled the "Progress oj Dul- 
ness,^^ and written between 1772 and 1774, satirizes the 
state of clerical education. 

Trumbull's other Hudibrastic work is a mock epic 
entitled M'Fingal, written between 1774 and 1782, which 
satirizes the follies of his countrymen, particularly of the 
Tory persuasion. The poem had great popularity; it is 
said to have passed through more than thirty editions. A 
taste of it may be had from the following description of 
how M'Fingal, a caricatured Tory, was punished by a 
patriot mob for cutting down a Liberty pole : — 

"Forthwith the crowd proceed to deck 
With halter'd noose M'Fingal's neck, 
While he in peril of his soul 
Stood tied half-hanging to the pole; 
Then lifting high the ponderous jar, 
Pour'd o'er his head the smoaking tar. 



Literature in America — 1776 to 1800 105 

With less profusion once was spread 
Oil on the Jewish monarch's head, 
That down his beard and vestments ran, 
And covered all his outward man. 

!jJ »(» Sp "P "T" 

His flowing wig, as next the brim, 
First met and drank the sable stream; 
Adown his visage stern and grave 
Roll'd and adhered the viscid wave; 
With arms depending as he stood. 
Each cup capacious holds the flood; 
From nose and chin's remotest end 
The tarry icicles descend; 
Till all o'erspread, with colors gay, 
He glittered to the western ray. 
Like sleet-bound trees in wintry skies, 
Or Lapland idol carved in ice. 
And now the feather-bag display'd 
Is waved in triumph o'er his head, 
And clouds him o'er with feathers missive, 
And down upon the tar, adhesive: 

:): 4: iH ^ 4: 

Now all complete appears our Squire, 

Like Gorgon or Chimjera dire; 

Nor more could boast on Plato's plan • 

To rank among the race of man, 

Or prove his claim to human nature. 

As a two-legg'd unfeather'd creature." 

Now, clearly, this is not Hudibras, any more than John 
Trumbull, the respectable and scholarly Connecticut 
lawyer of the closing eighteenth century, was Samuel But- 
ler, the prototype of Grub Street in Restoration London. 
Most historians of American literature who have touched M'Fingai 
on Trumbull have accordingly emphasized the difference Hudibras, 
between M'Fingai and Hudibras. For our purposes the 



106 



The Eighteenth Century 



likeness between the poems seems more significant. 
Butler died, poor and neglected, in 1680; Trumbull was 
prosperously alive one hundred and fifty years later; and 
yet their poems are so much alike as to indicate in the 
cleverest American satirist of the closing eighteenth 
century a temper essentially like that of the cleverest 

English satirist of a century be- 
fore. Butler was born less than 
ten years after Queen Elizabeth 
died, and Trumbull only ten 
years before the accession of 
King George III. These facts 
are a fresh indication of how 
nearly the native temper of 
America remained like that of 
the first immigration. 

Joel Barlow (1754 or 1755- 
1812), the other Hartford Wit 
who is still remembered, was 
rather more erratic. While a 
Yale undergraduate he served 
in the Continental Army, in 
which he was afterward a chaplain from 1780 to 1783. 
In 1786 he became a lawyer at Hartford, where he was 
later the editor of a weekly newspaper; and in 1787 
he published an epic poem entitled The Vision 0} Co- 
lumbus, which by 1807 had been elaborated into The 
Columhiad. Even in its first form this turgid epic was the 
most ambitious attempt at serious literature which had 
appeared in the United States. It brought Barlow politi- 
cal influence. He went abroad, first as a sort of business 
agent, and had something to do with politics in both 




^:^/^%^^-^^^ 



Literature in America — 1770 to 1800 107 

France and England. From 1795 to 1797 he was United 
States Consul at Algiers. From 1797 to 1805 he lived 
in Paris; from 1805 to 181 1 in Washington. In 181 1 he 
was made United States minister to France, in which 
character he journeyed to meet Napoleon in Russia; be- 
coming involved in the retreat from Moscow, he died from 
exhaustion at a Pohsh village on Christmas Eve, 181 2. 

Though The Columbiad was Barlow's most serious 
work, his most agreeable was a comic poem entitled The 
Hasty Pudding. This, written while he was abroad in 
1793, is a humorous lament that Europe lacks a delicacy 
of the table which, with the Atlantic between them, he 
remembered tenderly. 

Such was the first literary efflorescence of independent 
America. Although it contributed nothing memorable to 
the wisdom of the eternities, it was an intensely spirited 
effort, serious in purpose even if sometimes light in form, 
to create a literature which should assert national inde- 
pendence as firmly as that independence had been asserted 
in politics. The result was patriotic, it was not without The Hart- 
humor, it had all sorts of qualities of which one may speak pa'^frj^l*^ 
respectfully. At best, however, it was thoroughly imita- and 
tive, and at the same time full of indications that its writers 
lacked that peculiar fusion of thought and feeling which 
made English character in the eighteenth century such as 
could fitly be expressed by the kind of literature which the 
Hartford Wits so courageously attempted. An heroic, 
patriotic effort they stand for, made with enthusiasm, wit, 
and courage. Nobody can fairly hold them to blame for 
the fact that their America still lacked national experience 
ripe for expression in a form which should be distinctive. 

Contemporary with the Hartford Wits was a much less 



Freneau. 



108 The Eighteenth Century 

eminent man, until lately almost forgotten, whose memory 
is now beginning to revive. In one or two of his poems, 
it now seems probable, we can find more literary merit than 
in any other work produced in America before the nine- 
Phiiip teenth century. His name was Philip Freneau (1752- 
1832). He was the son of a New York wine merchant, 
of French-Huguenot descent. He was educated at Prince- 
ton, and having taken to the sea, was captured by the British 
during the Revolution and passed some time on a prison 
ship near New York, After the Revolution he resumed his 
mercantile career. In 1791 he became the editor of a very 
radical newspaper in Philadelphia. In 1 798 he took to the 
sea again; and the rest of his life has no significance for us. 
Freneau was a man of strong feeling, ardently in sym- 
pathy with the Revolution, and intensely democratic. As 
a journalist he was a bitter opponent of any attempt on 
the part either of England or of the more prudent class in 
his own country to assert authority; and a considerable 
part of his poetry consists of rather reckless satire, 
neither better nor worse than other satire of the 
period. Our bare outline of his life, however, indicates 
one characteristic fact. The son of a New York man of 
business, and a graduate of Princeton, Freneau became 
both a practical sailor and a journalist. Now, in George 
Ill's England a man who was either scholar, sailor, or 
journalist was apt to be nothing else; but in America to 
this day such a career as Freneau's remains far from un- 
usual. Far from unusual, too, it would have been in the 
England of Queen Elizabeth,^ — of which probably the 
most typical personage was Walter Ralegh, soldier, sailor, 
statesman, adventurer, chemist, historian, colonizer, 
poet, and a dozen things else. Ralegh's career was one 



Literature in America — 177(1 to 1800 109 

of unsurpassed magnificence; Freneau's in comparison 
seems petty. In both, however, one can see the common 
fact that a man whose life was intensely and variously busy 
found himself instinctively stirred to poetic expression. 

Though the greater part of Freneau's poetry was occa- 
sional, and, however interesting historically, not of the kind 
which rises above the dust of the centuries, he now and 
then struck a note different from any which had previously 
been sounded in America. His most generally recognized 
poem, "The Indian Burying-Ground," has true beauty. 
In the opening thought, that it were better for the alert 
dead to sit than to lie drowsing, there is something really 
imaginative. And in the pensive melancholy with which 
Freneau records the rock-tracings of the vanished natives 
of America, there is likeness to the motive of Keats's 
''Ode on a Grecian Urn," which, twelve years before 
Freneau died, permanently enriched English literature. 

Freneau expressed his motive simply, directly, and even 
beautifully; Keats expressed his immortally. The con- 
trast is one between good literature and great, between 
the very best that America had produced in the closing 
years of the eighteenth century and one of the many ex- 
cellent things which England produced during the first 
twenty years of the century which followed. 

The literature produced in this country between the Summary, 
outbreak of the American Revolution and the close of the 
eighteenth century may fairly be typified, if not precisely 
summarized, by what we have glanced at, — the writings 
of those orators and public men who reached their highest 
expression in the Federalist, the conscious and imitative 
effort of the Hartford Wits, and the sporadic poetry of 
Philip Freneau. 



IX 

SUMMARY 

We have now glanced at the hterary history of America 
during the first two centuries of American existence. In 
the seventeenth century, the century of immigration, when 
Americans feU themselves truly to be emigrant Enghsh- 
men, they expressed themselves only in such theological 
and historical work as may be typified by the Alagnalia 
of Cotton Mather. During the eighteenth century, the 
century of independence, when Americans felt themselves 
still Englishmen, but with no personal ties to England, 
America produced in literature a theology which ran to 
metaphysical extremes, such vigorous common sense as 
one finds in the varied works of FrankHn, and such writ- 
ings as we have glanced at since. These two centuries 
added to English literature the names of Shakspere, Milton, 
Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Burns. To 
match these names in America we can find none more 
eminent than those of Cotton Mather, Edwards, Franklin, 
the writers of the Federalist, the Hartford Wits, and Fre- 
neau. As we have seen, the history of England during 
these two centuries was that of a steadily developing and 
increasing national experience. In comparison, the his- 
tory of America reveals just that meagreness of artistic 
expression which we should expect as the result of her 
national inexperience. 



BOOK III 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK III 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

I 

ENGLISH HISTORY FROM 1800 TO 1900 

References 
Gardiner, Chapter liii-end. 

In 1800 King George III, who had been forty years xheSov 
on the throne, was lapsing into that melancholy madness '"'*^'^^- 
in which his sixty years of royalty closed. The last ten 
years of his reign were virtually part of his successor's, 
the Prince Regent, from 1820 George IV. In 1830 King 
WilHam IV succeeded his brother; his reign lasted only 
seven years. From 1837 until January, 1901, the sovereign 
of England was Queen Victoria. During the nineteenth 
century, then, only three EngHsh sovereigns came to the 
throne. It chances that each of these represents a dis- 
tinct phase of EngHsh history. 

The Regency, under which general name we may for The 
the moment include also the reign of George IV, was the ^*8^*°*y- 
time when the insular isolation of England was most pro- 
nounced. In 1798 Nelson won the battle of the Nile. 
No incident more definitely marks the international po- 
sition of England as the chief conservative defender of 
such traditions as for a while seemed fatally threatened 

113 



114 The Nineteenth Century 

by the French Revolution becoming incarnate in Napoleon. 
During the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century the 
conflict persisted, more and more isolating England and 
emphasizing English conservatism. In 1805, Trafalgar, 
Vi^hich finally destroyed the sea power of Napoleon, made 
the English Channel more than ever a frontier separating 
England from the rest of Europe. It was not until ten 
years later, in 181 5, that Waterloo, finally overthrowing 
Napoleon, made room for the reaction which overran con- 
tinental Europe for thirty years to come; and only then 
could England begin to relax that insularity which the 
Napoleonic wars had so developed in English temper. 
England is the only country of civilized Europe where 
Napoleon never succeeded in planting his power; and 
during the first part of the nineteenth century the price 
which England paid for freedom from invasion was an 
unprecedented concentration of her own life within her 
own bounds. This era of dogged resistance to the French 
Revolution finally developed the traditional type of John 
Bull. 

The Re- To supposc that England remained unmoved by revolu- 

tionary fervor would nevertheless be a complete mistake. 
Two years after William IV ascended the throne, there 
occurred in English politics an incident as revolutionary 
as any which ever took place in France. The results 
of it have long since altered the whole nature of Eng- 
lish life, social and political. Although revolutionary in 
purpose, however, and in ultimate effect rather more suc- 
cessfully revolutionary than any convulsion of continental 
Europe, the Reform Bill of 1832 was carried through 
in England by constitutional means. In brief, what 
happened was this. The House of Lords, the more con- 



form Bill, 
1832 



torian 
Era. 



English History— 1800 to 1900 115 

servative chamber of Parliament, was unprepared to pass 
the Reform Bill; the House of Commons, representing, 
it believed, the ardent conviction of the country, was de- 
termined that the Bill should be passed. Thereupon the 
King was persuaded to inform the Lords that in case they 
persisted in voting against the measure he should create 
new peers enough to make a majority of the House. This 
threat brought the conservative peers to terms. They did 
not vote for the measure, but under the leadership of the 
Duke of Wellington they walked out of the House in silent 
protest. A revolutionary threat on the part of the King 
had accompHshed under constitutional forms a peaceful 
revolution. 

Five years later King WiUiam IV was dead. Then The vk- 
began the reign of the most tenderly human sovereign in 
English history. For nearly sixty-four years, in the full 
blaze of public life, she did unfalteringly what she deemed 
her duty. This devoted conscientiousness has greatly 
strengthened English royalty. The fact that through 
sixty years of growing democracy the throne of England 
was jfilled by Queen Victoria has gone far to re-estab- 
lish in popular esteem a form of government which it is 
our fashion to call a thing of the past. 

In general this Victorian era was peaceful, but still 
one which is best typified by the latest title of its sover- 
eign. For during the last sixty years of the nineteenth 
century England was quietly asserting itself no longer 
as an isolated kingdom, but as a world-empire. This 
imperialism of England seems different from any other 
which has declared itself since the antique empire of Rome. 
It stands not for the assertion of central and despotic au- 
thority, but rather for the maintenance of government by 



116 The Nineteenth Century 

established custom. The Enghsh Common Law is a 
system not of rules, but of principles. So long as its in- 
fluence was confined to the island where it was developed, 
to be sure, it still seemed impracticably rigid. The Amer- 
ican Revolution, however, taught England a lesson 
now thoroughly learned, — that when English authority 
The Com- asscrts itsclf in foreign regions, the true spirit of the Com- 
mon Law YCion Law should recognize and maintain all local customs 

in the o 

Colonies, which do not conflict with public good. In India, for 
example, local custom sanctioned many things essentially 
abominable, — murder, self-immolation, and the hke. 
Such crimes against civilization the English power has 
condemned and repressed. Harmless local custom, on 
the other hand, — freedom of worship, pecuharities of land 
tenure, and whatever harmonizes with public order, — the 
Enghsh government has maintained as strenuously as in 
England itself it has maintained the customs pecuUar to 
the mother country. So in Canada it has maintained a 
hundred forms of old French law ancestral to those prov- 
inces. So in Australia it has maintained many new sys- 
tems and customs which have grown up in a colony settled 
since the American Revolution. Its modern state is typi- 
fied by the fact that in the judicial committee of the Privy 
Council — whose functions resemble those of the Supreme 
Court of the United States — there are now regularly mem- 
bers from Canada, from India, from Australia, to pro- 
nounce in this court of appeal on questions referred to the 
mother country from parts of the empire where the actual 
law differs from that of England herself. 

The Victorian epoch, then, has begun to explain the 
true spirit of the English law: whatever the letter, this 
spirit maintains that throughout the empire, and all the 



English History— 1800 to 1900 117 

places where the imperial influence extends, the whole 
force of England shall sustain the differing rights and 
traditions which have proved themselves, for the regions 
where they have grown, sound, safe, and favorable to 
civiUzed prosperity. 

Historically, to sum up, England began the nine- Summary, 
tecnth century as an isolated conservative power. In 
the reign of King William IV it underwent a revolution 
which its ancestral legal forms proved strong and flexible 
enough to accomplish without convulsion or bloodshed; 
and during the long reign of Queen Victoria it more and 
more widely asserted the imperial dominion of the flexibly 
vital traditions of our Common Law. 



II 

ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1800 TO 1900 

References 
In addition to the general authorities may be named C. H. Herford, r/ze 
Age of Wordsworth, London: Bell, 1897; Hugh Walker, The Age of Ten- 
nyson, London: Bell, 1897; A. E. Hancock, The Fj-ench Revolutioji and 
the English Poets, New York: Holt, 1899. 

So we come to the literature of England during the nine- 
teenth century. By chance several dates which we have 
named for other purposes are significant also in literary 
history. In 1798, when Nelson fought the battle of the 
Nile, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their famous 
Lyrical Ballads, the first important expression of the re- 
vived romantic spirit in English literature. In 1832, the 
year of the Reform Bill, Scott died; Byron, Shelley, and 
Keats were already dead; so was Miss Austen; and every 
literary reputation contemporary with theirs was finally 
established. 
From the The pcHod of EngUsh literature which began with the 
l^''!'.'"' , Lyrical Ballads and ended with the death of Scott may be 

Ballads to ' ■' _ 

the death roughly divided at 181 5, the year of Waterloo. The chief 
expression which preceded this was a passionate outburst 
of romantic poetry, maintaining in widely various forms 
the revolutionary principle that human beings left to them- 
selves may be trusted to tend toward righteousness; and 
that sin, evil, and pain are brought into being by those dis- 
tortions of human nature which are wrought by outworn 
custom and superstition. Though this philosophy may 
never have been precisely or fully set forth by any one of 
the Enghsh poets who flourished between 1800 and 181 5, 

118 



of Scott. 



English Literature — 1800 to 1900 119 

it pervades the work of all; and this work taken together is 
the most memorable body of poetry in our language, ex- 
cept the Elizabethan. So far as one can now tell, this 
school distinguishes itself from the Elizabethan, and from 
almost any other of equal merit in literary history, by the 
fact that the passionate devotion of these new poets to the 
ideal of freedom in both thought and phrase made them 
almost as different from one another as the poets of the 
eighteenth century were alike. For all this, as one reads 
them now, one perceives a trait common throughout their 
work. Despite the fervor of their revolutionary individu- 
alism, Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron and Shelley 
and the rest agreed eagerly in looking forward to an en- 
franchised future in which this world was to be far better 
than in the tyrant-ridden past. This was the dominant 
sentiment of English literature from the battle of the Nile 
to that of Waterloo. 

Between Waterloo and the Reform Bill, a new phase of The 
feeling dominated the literature of England. Though novViL*^ 
something of this elder spirit of hope lingered, the most 
considerable fact was the pubhcation of all but the first 
two of the Waverley Novels. The contrast between these 
and the preceding poetry is impressive. What gave them 
popularity and has assured them permanence is the 
fervor with which they retrospectively assert the beauty of 
ideals which even in their own time v/ere almost extinct. 
The first outburst of English literature in the nineteenth 
century was a poetry animated by aspiration toward an 
ideal future; the second phase of that Hterature, expressed 
by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, dwelt in carelessly digni- 
fied prose on the nobler aspects of a real past. 

These two phases of English literature roughly cor- 



120 The Nineteenth Century 

Victorian respond with the Regency and the reign of WilHam IV. 

tyjj ' The literature which has ensued will probably be known 
to the future as Victorian; and it is still too near 
us for any confident generalization. But although there 
has been admirable Victorian poetry, of which the most 
eminent makers are now thought to have been Ten- 
nyson and the Brownings; and although serious Vic- 
torian prose, of which perhaps the most eminent makers 
were Ruskin and Carlyle, has seemed of paramount 
interest, posterity will probably find the most charac- 
teristic feature of Victorian literature to have been 
fiction. It is almost hterally to the reign of Queen Vic- 
toria that we owe the whole work of Dickens, Thack- 
eray, George Eliot, and the numberless lesser novelists and 
story-tellers whose books have been the chief reading of 
the Enghsh-speaking world, down to the days of Stevenson 
and Rudyard Kiphng. 

Broadly speaking, we may accordingly say that up to the 
time of the Reform Bill the English hterature of the nine- 
teenth century expressed itself first in that body of aspiring 
poetry which seems the most memorable English utterance 
since EHzabethan times, and secondly in those novels of Sir 
Walter Scott, which, dealing romantically with the past, 
indicate the accomplishment of a world revolution; and 
that since the Reform Bill decidedly the most popular 
phase of English literature has been prose fiction dealing 
with contemporary life. 

SUght as this sketch of English literature in the nine- 
teenth century has been, it is sufficient for our purpose, 
which is only to remind ourselves of what occurred in Eng- 
land during the century when something which we may 
fairly call literature developed in America. 



Ill 

AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 1800 TO 1900 

References 

General Authorities: Excellent short accounts are Channing, Ski- 
dent's History, 317-end; Hart, Formation of the Union, 176-end; Wilson, 
Division and Reunion. 

Special Works: The authorities mentioned in the brief bibliographies 
at the beginnings of chapters in the books mentioned above, and, for 
minute study, the works referred to in the larger bibliography mentioned 
below. 

Bibliography: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 167-214. 

Amid the constant growth of democracy, amid practical 
assertion of the power which resides in the uneducated 
classes, and which our Constitution made conscious, our 
national life began with bewildering confusion. To the 
better classes, embodied in the old Federalist party, this 
seemed anarchical; the election of Jefferson (1800) they 
honestly believed to portend the final overthrow of law 
and order. Instead of that, one can see now, it really 
started our persistent progress. Among the early incidents 
of this progress was the purchase of Louisiana, which 
finally established the fact that the United States were to 
dominate the North American continent. So complete, 
indeed, has our occupation of this continent become that 
it is hard to remember how in 1800 the United States, at 
least so far as they were settled, were almost comprised 
between the AUeghanies and the Atlantic. In less than Expan- 
one hundred years we have colonized, and to a considerable 



sion. 



122 The Nineteenth Century 

degree civilized, the vast territory now under our undis- 
puted control. 

Our expansion began with the purchase of Louisiana. 
Nine years later, under President Madison, came that 
second war with England which, while unimportant in 
English history, was very important in ours. The War 
of 1 812 asserted our independent nationality, our ability 
to maintain ourselves against a foreign enemy, and, above 
all, our fighting power on the sea. The War of 181 2, 
besides, did much to revive and strengthen the Revolu- 
tionary conviction that England must always be our 
natural enemy. Before that war broke out there were 
times when conflict seemed almost as likely to arise with 
France. It was an incident, we can now see, of that 
death-grapple wherein England was maintaining against 
Napoleonic Europe those traditions of Common Law 
which we share with her. America had felt the arbitrary 
insolence of Napoleon, as well as that of England; neu- 
trality proved impossible. We chanced to take arms once 
more against the mother country. Thereby, whatever we 
gained, — and surely our strengthened national integrity is 
no small blessing, — we certainly emphasized and pro- 
longed our Revolutionary misunderstanding. 
The The next critical fact in our history was the assertion in 

1823 of the Monroe Doctrine. In brief, this declares that 
the chief pohtical power in America is the United States; 
and that any attempt on the part of a foreign power to 
establish colonies in America, or to interfere with the gov- 
ernments already established there, will be regarded by 
the United States as an unfriendly act. This declaration 
has generally been respected. Except for the transitory 
empire, of Maximilian in Mexico, the integrity of the 



Monroe 
Doctrine 



War. 



American History— 1800 to 1900 123 

American continent has been respected since President 
Monroe's famous message. 

During the next thirty-five years developed that inevi- The civil 
table national disunion v^hich culminated in the Civil War 
of i86i. The economic and social systems of North and 
of South were radically different: generation by genera- 
tion they naturally bred men less and less able to under- 
stand each other. The Southerners of the fifties were 
far more like their revolutionary ancestors than were the 
Northerners. General Washington and General Lee, 
for example, have many more points of resemblance than 
have President Washington and President Lincoln; and 
Lee was really as typically Southern in his time as Lincoln 
in those same days was typically Northern. The Civil 
War involved deep moral questions, concerning the insti- 
tution of slavery and national union; but on those moral 
questions North and South honestly differed. What ulti- 
mately makes the War so heroic a tradition is the fact that 
on both sides men ardently gave their lives for what they 
believed to be the truth. The conflict was truly irrepres- 
sible; the two sections of our country had developed in 
ways so divergent that nothing but force could prevent 
disunion. 

Disunion did not ensue. Instead of it, after a troubled 
interval, has come a union constantly stronger. Our 
history since the Civil War is too recent for confident gen- 
eralization. Two or three of its features, however, are 
growing salient. Long before the Civil War certain phases 
of material prosperity had begun to develop in this coun- 
try, — the great cotton-growing of the South, for one thing, 
and for another, the manufactures of New England. Since 
the Civil War some similar economic facts have produced 



the West. 



124 Tlie Nineteenth Century 

marked changes in our national equilibrium. One has 
been the opening of the great lines of transcontinental 
railway. Along with these has developed the enormous 
growth of bread-stuffs throughout the West, together with 
incalculable increase of our mineral wealth. These causes 
have effected the complete settlement of our national 
Reunion; territory. At the close of the Civil War a great part 
ment of ^^ the country between the Mississippi and Cahfornia 
remained virtually unappropriated. At present almost 
every available acre of it is in private ownership. 
Our continent is finally settled. Such freedom as our 
more adventurous spirits used to find in going West they 
must now find, if at all, in emigrating, like our English 
cousins, to regions not politically under our control. There 
they must face a serious question. Shall they submit them- 
selves in these foreign places where their active lives must 
pass, to legal and political systems foreign to their own; 
or shall they assert in those regions the legal and political 
principles which the fact of their ancestral language makes 
them believe more admirable? 

So for the first time since the settlement of Virginia and 
New England we come to a point where the history of Eng- 
land and that of America assume similar aspects. For 
nearly three centuries the national experience of England 
and the national inexperience of America have tended 
steadily to diverge. Now the growing similarity of the 
problems which confront both countries suggests that in 
years to come we may understand each other better. 



IV 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 1800 TO 1900 

It is only during this nineteenth century, as we have 
seen, that literature in America has advanced to a point 
where it deserves detached study. By chance its various 
phases, though not exactly hke those of contemporary 
English literature, fall into chronologic groups very like 
those which we noted in the literature of the mother country. 
During the first thirty years of this century the chief de- 
velopment of hterature in America took place in the Mid- 
dle States, centring — as the life of the Middle States tended 
more and more to centre — in the city of New York. The 
Hterary prominence of this region roughly corresponds 
with those years between 1798 and 1832 which produced 
the poets of the Regency and the "Waverley Novels." 
Meanwhile, as we shall see later, New England, which for 
a century past had been less conspicuous in American 
intellectual life than at the beginning, was gathering the 
strength which finally expressed itself in the most im- 
portant literature hitherto produced in our country. 
Broadly speaking, this literature was contemporary with 
the Victorian. In 1837, when the Queen came to the 
throne, it was hardly in existence; before 1881, when 
George Eliot, the third of the great Victorian novelists, 
died, it was virtually complete. To-day it may be re- 
garded as a thing of the past. What has succeeded it is 

125 



126 The Nineteenth Century 

too recent for detailed treatment; yet we must give our- 
selves some account of it. In the chapters to come, then, 
we shall consider these three literary epochs in turn : first, 
the prominence of the Middle States; next, the Renais- 
sance of New England; and, finally, what has followed. 



BOOK IV 

LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE 
STATES FROM 1798 TO 1857 



BOOK IV 

LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE 
STATES FROM 1798 TO 1857 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 

References 

Works: Novels, 6 vols., Philadelphia: McKay, 1887. 

Biography and Criticism: William Dunlap, Life of Charles Brock- 
den Brown, 2 vols., Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815; W. H. Pres- 
cott's Memoir in Sparks's Library oj American Biography, I, iig-180 
and also (pp. 1-56) in Prescott's Biographical and Critical Miscellanies, 
New York: Harpers, 1845. 

Bibliography: Foley, 27-28. 

Selections: Carpenter, 89-100; Duyckinck, I, 591-595; *Stedman 
and Hutchinson, IV, 265-292. 

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was born in Life. 
Philadelphia, of Quaker parentage. For a while he 
studied law, but at the age of about twenty-five he turned 
to letters. Before 1796 he had contributed essays to the 
Columbus Magazine; in 1797 he published a work on 
marriage and divorce entitled The Dialogue oj Alcuin. 
In the following year, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, he 
produced his first novel, Wieland, which had popular suc- 
cess. Within six years he had published five other novels.: 
Ormonde 17991 -^y^/twr Mervyn, 1799-1800; Edgar Hunt- 

Z89 



130 Literature in the Middle States 



Contem- 
porary 
Estimates 
of Brown. 



ley, 1801; Clara Howard, 1801; and Jane Talbot, 1804. 
Meanwhile, in 1 799, he had become editor of the Monthly 
Magazine and American Review, which lasted only a fev; 
months. For five years after 1803 he edited The Literary 
Magazine and American Register. 
The greater part of his hterary Hfe 
was passed in New York. 

Brown's mature years came 
during that period, between the 
Revolution and the War of 181 2, 
when the American feeling of 
national independence was 
strongest. For the first time 
Europeans were becoming aware 
that America existed. Native 
Americans were consequently 
possessed by an impulse to de- 
clare to all mankind, and partic- 
ularly to Europeans, that Amer- 
icans are a race of remarkable merit. This impulse is 
clearly evident in the works of Brown; it is more so still 
in the books which Dunlap and Prescott wrote about him. 
These biographers were disposed not only to speak of him 
in superlative terms, but also to maintain as his chief 
claim to eminence that his work, being purely American, 
must be thoroughly original. 

The most cursory glance at Brown's English contem- 
poraries should have reminded his biographers that no 
claim could be much worse founded. During the last ten 
years of the eighteenth century, English prose literature 
was not particularly rich. Among its most conspicuous 
phases was a kind of darkly romantic novel, which prob- 




^^ ^J^/Tft/n? 



Charles Brockdcn Brown 131 

ably reached its highest development in Germany. Half 
ar century before, English fiction had produced master- 
pieces, — Clarissa Harlowe, for example, Tom Jones, ' 
Tristram Shandy, and The Vicar oj Wakefield. Between 
1790 and 1800 English fiction was in that apparently de- 
cadent condition manifested by such books as Lewis's 
Monk (1795), Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho 
(1794), and Godwin's more significant Caleb Williams 
(1794)- 

Were there no direct evidence that Brockden Brown was Godwin's 
consciously influenced by Godwin, the fact might be in- ^'^^^^^'^^ 
ferred from the general character of his style; but Brown. 
Brown's own words assert that he deliberately made God- 
win his model: 

"What is the nature or merit of my performance? . . . When a 
mental comparison is made between this and the mass of novels, I 
am incHned to be pleased with my own production. But when the 
objects of comparison are changed, and I revolve the transcendent 
merits of Caleb Williams, my pleasure is diminished, and is pre- 
served from a total extinction only by the reflection that this per- 
formance is the first."* 

Yet, although Brown followed Godwin in matters of Brown's 
political philosophy, he struck out for himself in one ^^|f^'" 
point: he aimed to depart from the Lewis and RadcHffe 
school by making his backgrounds American and by using 
incidents which had actually happened or might happen, 
in America, instead of the haunted castles of his English 
predecessors. This intention he makes explicit in the 
preface to Edgar Huntley: 

". . . One merit the writer may at least claim — that of calling 
forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader by 

* Dunlap's Life of Brown, I, 107. 



132 Literature in the Middle States 

means hitherto unemployed. . . . Puerile superstition and ex- 
ploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually 
employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostihty, and the 
perils of the Western wilderness are far more suitable; and for a na- 
tive of America to overlook these would admit of no apology. These, 
therefore, are in part, the ingredients of this tale, and these he has 
been ambitious of depicting in vivid and faithful colours. The suc- 
cess of his efforts must be estimated by the liberal and candid 
reader." 

wieiand. Onc's first imprcssion is that, with this rather im- 
portant exception of background and the general char- 
acter of the incident, Brown's novels are merely imitative. 
After a while, however, one begins to feel, beneath his 
imitation, a touch of something individual. In Wieiand 
the hero is a gentleman of Philadelphia, who in the midst 
of almost ideal happiness is suddenly accosted by a mys- 
terious voice which orders hini to put to death his super- 
humanly perfect wife and children. The mysterious 
voice, which pursues him through increasing horror, 
declares itself to be that of God. At last, driven to 
madness by this appalling visitant, Wieiand murders 
his family. To this point, in spite of confusion and 
turgidity, the story has power. The end is ludicrous- 
ly weak; the voice of God turns out to have been 
merely the trick of a malignant ventriloquist. The triv- 
iality of this catastrophe tends to make you feel as if all 
the preceding horrors had been equally trivial. Really 
this is not the case. The chapters in which the mind of 
Wieiand is gradually possessed by delusion could have 
been written only by one who had genuinely felt a sense of 
what hideously mysterious things may lie beyond human 
ken. Some such sense as this, in terribly serious form, 
haunted the imagination of Puritans. In a meretricious 



Charles Brockdcn Brown 133 

form it appears in the work of Poe. In a form alive 
with beauty it reveals itself throughout the melancholy 
romances of Hawthorne. In Poe's work and in Haw- 
thorne's it is handled with mastery, and few men of 
letters have been much further from mastery of their art 
than Charles Brockden Brown; but the sense of horror 
which Brown expressed in Wieland is genuine. To feel 
its power you need only compare it with the similar feeling 
expressed in Lewis's Monk, in the Mysteries oj Udolpho, 
or even in Caleb Williams itself. 

In two of Brown's later novels, Ormond (1799) and 
Arthur Mervyn (i 799-1800) there are touches more directly 
from life which show another kind of power. Among his 
most poignant personal experiences was the terrible fact 
of epidemic yellow fever. In both Ormond and Arthur 
Mervyn there are descriptions of this pestilence almost as 
powerful as Defoe's descriptions of the London plague. 
This power of setting his scenes in a vividly real back- vivid 
ground appears again in Edgar Huntley. The incidents gr^o'unds 
of this story are unimportant except as they carry a som- '" 
nambulist into the woods and caves of the Pennsylvanian Novels, 
country. These, despite some theatrically conventional 
touches, are almost as real as the somnambulist is false. 
Such incongruities cannot blend harmoniously; Brown's 
incessant combination of reality in nature with unreality 
in character produces an effect of bewildering confusion. 

Nor is this confusion in Brown's novels wholly a matter His Plots. 
of conception. Few writers anywhere seem at first more 
hopelessly to lack constructive power. Take Arthur 
Mervyn, for example: the story begins in the first person; 
the narrator meets somebody in whose past history he is 
interested; thereupon the second personage begins to 



134 Literature in the Middle States 

narrate his own past, also in the first person; in the course 
of this narrative a third character appears, who soon pro- 
ceeds to begin a third autobiography; and so on. As one 
who is bewildered by this confusion, however, pauses to 
unravel it, a significant fact appears. Whoever tries to 
write fiction must soon discover one of his most difficult 
problems to be the choice and maintenance of a definite 
point of view. To secure one, this device of assum- 
ing the first person is as old as the Odyssey, where 
Odysseus narrates so many experiences to the king 
of the Phffiacians. In brief, a resort to this world-old 
device generally indicates a conscious effort to get ma- 
terial into manageable form. These inextricable tangles 
of autobiography, which make Brockden Brown's con- 
struction appear so formless, probably arose from an 
impotent sense that form ought to be striven for; and, 
indeed, when any one of his autobiographic episodes 
is taken by itself it will generally be found pretty satis- 
factory. 

When we come to the technical question of style, too, 
the simple test of reading aloud will show that Brockden 
Brown's sense of form was unusual. Of course his work 
shows many of the careless faults inevitable when men 
write with undue haste. His vocabulary is certainly 
turgid; and consciously trying to write effectively, he often 
wrote absurdly; but his ear was true. If you read him 
aloud, you will find your voice dwelling where the sense 
requires it to dwell. 

Brockden Brown's novels may be held to mark the 
beginning of literature in America. It is noteworthy, 
accordingly, that the literature of America begins exactly 
where the pure hterature of a normally developed language 



of Form. 



Charles Brockclcn Bronm 135 

is apt to leave off. A great literature, originating from the sum- 
heart of the people, declares itself first in spontaneous songs g "wn's 
and ballads and legends; it is apt to end in prose fiction, sense of 

Mystery 

With labored and imitative prose fiction our American and sense 
literature begins. This labored prose fiction of Brown 
has traits, however, which distinguish it from similar work 
in England. To begin with, the sense of horror which 
permeates it is not conventional but genuine. Brockden 
Brown could instinctively feel, more deeply than almost 
any native Englishman since the days of Elizabeth, what 
mystery may lurk just beyond human ken. In the second 
place. Brown's work, for all its apparent confusion, proves 
confused chiefly by a futile attempt to fix his point of view 
through autobiographic devices. In the third place, he 
reveals on almost every page an instinctive sense of rhyth- 
mical form. 

Brown's six novels are rather long, and all are hastily 
written. In his short, invalid life he never attempted any 
other form of fiction. As one considers his work, how- 
ever, one may well incline to guess that if he had confined 
his attempts to single episodes, — if he had had the 
originality to invent the short story, — he might have 
done work comparable with that of Irving or Poe or even 
Hawthorne. Brockden Brown, in brief, never stumbled 
on the one literary form which he might have mastered; 
pretty clearly that literary form was the sort of romantic 
short story whose motive is mysterious; and since his time 
that kind of short story has proved itself the most charac- 
teristic phase of native American fiction. 



II 

WASHINGTON IRVING 

References 

Works: Various editions, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New 
York. An excellent one is that in 40 vols., 1891-97. 

Biography and Criticism: P. M. Irving, Life and Letters 0} Wash- 
ington Irving, 4 vols., New York: Putnam, 1862-64; *C. D. Warner, 
Washington Irving, Boston: Houghton, 1881 (aml). 

Bibliography: Foley, 150-154. 

Selections: *Carpenter, 124-146; Duyckinck, II, 53-59; Griswold, 
Prose, 206-222; *Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 41-83. 

J. K. PAULDING 

Works: Select Works, 4 vols., New York: Scribner, 1867-68. 

Biography and Criticism: W. I. Paulding, Literary Life of James K. 
Paulding, New York: Scribner, 1867. 

Bibliography: Foley, 222-223. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 6-10; Griswold, Poetry, 83-85; Stedman, 
17; *Stedman and Hutchinson, IV, 402-4:9. 

The name of Washington Irving (i 783-1859) re- 
minds us rather startlingly how short is the real history of 
American letters. Although he has been dead for decidedly 
more than forty years, many people still remember him 
personally; and when in 1842 he went as President Tyler's 
minister to Spain, he passed through an England where 
Queen Victoria had already been five years on the throne. 
Life. Yet this Irving, who has hardly faded from living memory, 

may in one sense be called, more certainly than Brockden 
Brown, the first American man of letters. He was the first 
whose work has remained popular; and the first, too, who 

136 



srundi. 



Washington Irving 137 

was born after the Revolution, which made native Ameri- 
cans no longer British subjects but citizens of the United 
States. His parents, to be sure, were foreign, his father 
Scotch, his mother Enghsh; but he himself was born in 
New York. He was not very strong; his education was 
consequently irregular; he read law languidly; and at the 
age of twenty-one he was sent abroad for his health. There 
he remained two years. 

In 1806, Irving returned home; the next year, in com- 
pany with William Irving and James Kirke Paulding, he 
began writing a series of essays called Salmagundi'^ (1807- saima 
1808). Only his subsequent eminence has preserved 
from obhvion these conventional survivals of the eighteenth 
century. About this time he fell in love with a young 
girl whose death at seventeen almost broke his heart. 
When she died he was at her bedside; and throughout 
his later life he could not bear to hear her name mentioned. 
The tender melancholy in so many of his writings was 
probably due to this bereavement. 

In 1809 he published his first important book — the 
"Knickerbocker" History of New York.-\ Shortly there- 
after he devoted himself to business; and in 181 5 he went 
abroad in connection with his affairs. There, after a 
few years, commercial misfortune overtook him. In 
1 819 and 1820 he brought out his Sketch Book; from 
that time forth he was a professional man of letters. He 
remained abroad until 1832, spending the years between 
1826 and 1829 in Spain, and those between 1829 and 1832 

* In cookery, salmagundi is a dish "consisting of chopped meats, 
eggs, anchovies, onions, oil, etc."; applied to literature, it means a col- 
lection of miscellaneous essays. 

t The title is A History of New York from the Beginning of the World 
to the End of the Dutch Dynasty * * * By Diedrich Knickerbocker. 



138 Literature in the Middle States 



Four 
Classes of 
his Work. 



Comic 
History. 



as Secretary to the American Legation in London. Com- 
ing home, he resided for six or seven years at Tarrytown 
on the Hudson, in that house, "Sunnysidc," which has 
become associated with his name. From 1842 to 1846 
he was Minister to Spain. He then finally returned home, 
crowning his literary work with his Life 0} Washington, 
of which the first volume ap- 
peared in 1855, and the last — the 
fifth — in the year of his death, 
1859.^ 

Irving w^as the first American 
man of letters to attract wide 
attention abroad. His Knicker- 
bocker History was favorably 
received by contemporary Eng- 
land; and the Sketch Book and 
Bracebridge Hall, which followed 
it in 1822, were from the begin- 
ning what they have remained, 
— as popular in England as they have been in his native 
country. The same, on the whole, is true of his writ- 
ings about Spain; and, to a somewhat slighter degree, 
of his Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1840), and his Life 
of Washington. The four general classes of work here 
mentioned followed one another in fairly distinct succession 
through his half-century of literary life. We may perhaps 
get our clearest notion of him by considering them in 
turn. 

The Knickerbocker History has properly lasted. The 
origin of this book resembles that of Dickens's Pick- 
wick Papers some twenty-five years later. Both began 
as burlesques and ended as independent works of fic- 




^^L/«C*.^<?^ 



y^ 



Washington Irving 



139 



tion, retaining of Iheir origin little more trace than 
occasional extravagance. In 1807 Dr. Samuel Latham Origin and 
Mitchill had published A Picture 0} New York, ridiculous, 
even among works of its time, for ponderous pretentious- 
ness. The book had such success, however, that Irving 
and his brother were moved to write a parody of it. Pres- 
ently Irving's brother went abroad, leaving the work to 



Purpose of 
the Knick- 
erbocker 
History. 




SUNNYSIDE, irving's HOME AT TARRYTOWN 

Irving himself. The "Author's Apology" prefixed to 
the Knickerbocker History tells how, as he wrote on, his 
style and purpose underwent a change. Instead of bur- 
lesquing Mitchill, he found himself composing a comic 
history of old New York, and incidentally introducing a 
good deal of personal and political satire, now as forgot- 
ten as that which lies neglected in "Gulliver's Travels." 
His style, which began in dehberately ponderous imitation 
of Dr. Mitchill's, passed almost insensibly into one of con- 
siderable freedom, so evidently modelled on that of eigh- 
teenth-century England as to seem like some skilful bit 



140 Literature in the Middle States 

of English writing during the generation which preceded 
the American Revolution. The substance of the book, 
however, is distinctly different from what was then usual 
in England. 

Assuming throughout the character of Diedrich Knicker- 
bocker, an eccentric old bachelor who typifies the decaying 
Dutch families of New York, Irving mingles with many 
actual facts of colonial history all manner of unbridled 
extravagance. The governors and certain other of his 
personages are historical; the wars with New Englanders 
are historical wars; and historical, too, is the profound 
distaste for Yankee character which Irving needed no 
assumed personality to feci. But throughout there 
mingles with these historical facts the wildest sort of 
sportive nonsense. Wouter Van Twiller, to take a casual 
example, was an authentic Dutch governor of New Am- 
sterdam; and here is the way in which Irving writes 
about him: — 

"In his council he presided with great state and solemnity. He 
sat in a huge chair of sohd oak, hewn in the celebrated forest of the 
Hague, fabricated by an experienced timmerman of Amsterdam, and 
curiously carved about the arms and feet, into exact imitations of 
gigantic eagle's claws. Instead of a sceptre he swayed a long Turk- 
ish pipe, wrought with jasmin and amber, which had been presented 
to a stadtholder of Holland, at the conclusion of a treaty with one of 
the petty Barbary powers. In this stately chair would he sit, and 
this magnificent pipe would he smoke, shaking his right knee with 
a constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours together upon a little 
print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black frame against the op- 
posite wall of the council chamber. Nay, it has even been said that 
when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on 
the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes tor full two 
hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects — 
and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was evinced by 



Washington Irving 141 

certain regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared were 
merely the noise of conflict, made by his contending doubts and 
opinions."* 

More than possibly the chair here mentioned was some 
real chair which Irving had seen and in which an old Dutch 
governor might have sat. Conceivably the Turkish pipe 
may have been at least legendarily true. The rest of the 
passage is utter extravagance; yet you will be at a little 
pains to say just where fact passes into nonsense. 

Though this kind of humor is not unprecedented, one 
thing about it is worth attention. When we were con- 
sidering the work of Franldin, we found in his letter to a 
London newspaper concerning the state of the American 
colonies a grave mixture of fact and nonsense, remarkably 
like the American humor of our later days. In Irving's its Humor. 
Knickerbocker History we find something very similar. 
The fun of the thing lies in frequent and often im- 
perceptible lapses from sense to nonsense and back again. 
This deliberate confusion of sense and nonsense, in short, 
proves generally characteristic of American humor; and 
although the formal amenity of Irving's style often makes 
him seem rather an imitator of the eighteenth-century 
English writers than a native American, one can feel 
that if the Knickerbocker History and Franklin's letter 
could be reduced to algebraic formulae, these formulae 
would pretty nearly coincide. The temper of the Knick- 
erbocker History, may, accordingly, be regarded as freshly 
American. The style, meanwhile, is rather like that of 
Goldsmith. When the Knickerbocker History was pub- 
lished, Goldsmith had been dead for thirty-five years. 
In Irving we find a man who used the traditional style 
* Bk. iii, chap. i. 



142 Literature in the Middle States 

of eighteenth-century England for a purpose foreign at 
once to the century and the country of its origin. 

It was ten years before Irving again appeared as a seri- 
ous man of letters. Then came the Sketch Book, which 
contains his best-known stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and 
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The book is a collec- 
tion of essays and short stories, written in a style more like 
Goldsmith's than ever. The year in which it appeared was 
that which gave to England the first two cantos of Byron's 
Don Juan, Scott's Bride of Lammermoor and Legend 
0} Montrose, Shelley's Cenci, and Wordsworth's Peter Bell. 
There can be little doubt that in formal style the Sketch 
Book is more conscientious than any of these. Its prose, 
in fact, has hardly been surpassed, if indeed it has been 
equalled, in nineteenth-century England. This prose, 
however, is of that balanced, cool, rhythmical sort which 
was at its best in England during the mid years of the 
eighteenth century. 

In the Sketch Book there arc many papers and passages 
which might have come straight from some of the later 
eighteenth- century essayists. On the other hand, there are 
many passages, such as are most familiar in "Rip Van 
Winkle," which could hardly have appeared in Gold- 
smith's England. Though Goldsmith's England was 
becoming sentimental, it never got to that delight 
in a romantic past which characterized the period 
of Sir Walter Scott. By 1819, however, Scott had 
attained his highest development. His work is far 
more passionate and profound than are the roman- 
tic stories of Irving; in technical form, on the other 
hand, it is comparatively careless, nor on the whole 
is it more genuinely permeated with the romantic senti- 



Washington Irving 143 

mcnt of the nineteenth century. The story of Rip Van 
Winkle, for example, is a legend which exists in various 
European forms. Whether Irving adapted it from such 
old German tales as that of the sleeping Barbarossa, or 
from some Spanish story of enchanted Moors, or whether 
in his time the legend itself had migrated to the Hudson 
Valley, makes no difference. He assumed that it belonged 
in the Catskills. He placed it, as a little earlier Brockden 
Brown placed his less important romances, in a real back- 
ground ; and he infused into it the romantic spirit already 
characteristic of European letters, which was soon to 
be almost more so of our own. He enlivened the tale, 
meanwhile, with a subdued form of such humor as runs 
riot in the Knickerbocker History; and all this modern 
sentiment he phrased, as he had phrased his first book, 
in the terms of Goldsmith's time. The peculiar trait of The Pecu- 
the Sketch Book is this combination of fresh romantic /he sketch 
feeling with traditional Augustan style. ^°°^- 

The passages of the Sketch Book which deal with Eng- 
land reveal so sympathetic a sense of old English tradition 
that some of them, like those concerning Stratford and 
Westminster Abbey, have become classical; just as Ir- 
ving's later work, Bracebridge Hall, is now generally ad- 
mitted to typify a pleasant phase of English country life 
almost as well as Sir Roger de Coverley typified another, 
a century earlier. There are papers in the Sketch Book, 
however, which for us are more significant. Take those, 
for example, on "John Bull" and on "English Writers 
Concerning America." Like the writing of Hopkinson at 
the time of the American Revolution, these reveal a distinct 
sense on the part of an able and cultivated American that 
the contemporary English differ from our countrymen. 



144 Literature in the Middle States 

Bracebridge Hall (1822) and the Tales 0} a Traveller 
(1824), which followed the Sketch Book, resemble it in 
character. Irving's most noteworthy feat in all three books 
is that he made prominent in English literature a form in 
which for a long time to come Americans excelled native 
Englishmen, — the short story. Certainly until the time 
of Robert Louis Stevenson, no English-speaking writer 
out of America had produced many short stories of such 
merit as Hawthorne's and Poe's and Irving's. In this 
fact there is something akin to that other fact which we 
have just remarked, — the formal superiority of Irving's 
style to that of contemporary Englishmen. A good short 
story must generally be more careful in form than a novel. 
Now, during the nineteenth century American men of 
letters have usually had a more conscious sense of form than 
their English contemporaries. The artistic conscience 
revealed in the finish of Irving's style and in his mastery 
of the short story may accordingly be called characteristic 
of his country. 

Equally characteristic of America, in the somewhat 
different manner foreshadowed by Bracebridge Hall and 
the Tales 0} a Traveller, are the series of Irving's 
writings, between 1828 and 1832, which deal with Spain. 
He was first attracted thither by a proposition that he 
should translate a Spanish book concerning Columbus. 
Instead of so doing, he ended by writing his History 
of the Lije and Times of Christopher Columbus (1828), 
which was followed by A Chronicle of the Conquest of 
Granada (1829) and The Alhambra (1832). For Ameri- 
cans, Spain has sometimes had more romantic charm than 
all the rest of Europe put together. In the first place, as 
the very name of Columbus should remind us, its history is 



Washington Irving 145 

inextricably connected with our own. In the second place, 
at just the moment when this lasting connection between 
Spain and the New World declared itself, the eight hun- 
dred years' struggle between Moors and Spaniards had 
at length ended in the triumph of the Christians; and no 
other conflict of the whole European past involved a con- 
trast of life and of ideals more vivid, more complete, more 
varied, or more prolonged. In the third place, the stagna- 
tion of Spain began almost immediately; so in the early 
nineteenth century Spain had altered less since 1492 
than any other part of Europe. Elsewhere an Ameri- 
can traveller could find traces of the picturesque, romantic, 
vanished past. In Spain he could find a state of life so 
little changed from olden time that he seemed almost 
to travel into that vanished past itself. 

Now, as the American character of the nineteenth cen- irving's 
tury has declared itself, few of its aesthetic traits are more J^e Past!" 
marked than eager delight in olden splendors. Such 
delight, of course, has characterized the nineteenth century 
in Europe as well as among ourselves. A modern Lon- 
doner, however, who can walk in a forenoon from West- 
minster Abbey to the Temple Church and so to the 
Tower, can never dream what such monuments mean to 
an imagination which has grown up amid no grander 
relics of antiquity than King's Chapel or Independence 
Hall. Americans can still feel the romance even of 
modern London or Paris ; and to this day there is no spot 
where our starved craving for picturesque traces of a 
human past can be more profusely satisfied than in Spain. 
No words have ever expressed this satisfaction more 
sincerely or more spontaneously than the fantastic stories 
of old Spain which Irving has left us. 



146 Literature in the Middle States 

Biog- His later work was chiefly biographical. Both his 

"'' ^' Goldsmith and his Washington are written with all his 
charm and with vivid imagination. Irving, however, was 
no trained scholar. He was far even from the critical 
habit of the New England historians, and further still 
from such learning as now makes our best history some- 
thing like exact science. He was almost as anxious to write 
harmingly as to write truly; but in itself this desire was 
beautifully true. Throughout Irving wrote as well as he 
could, and he knew how to write better than almost any 
contemporary Englishman. 
Summary. Our hasty glancc at Irving's hterary career has shown 
what this first American who established a lasting Euro- 
pean reputation really accomplished. His greatest merits 
are artistic conscience and purity of style. If we ask 
ourselves, however, what he used his style to express, 
we find in the first place a quaintly extravagant humor 
growing more delicate with the years; next we find ro- 
mantic sentiment set forth in the hterary manner of a past 
English generation whose temper had been not romantic, 
but classical; then we find a deep delight in the splendors 
of a romantic past; and finally we come to pleasantly 
vivid romantic biographies. Clearly Irving had no mes- 
sage; he was animated by no profound sense of the 
mystery of existence. All he did was to set forth delicate, 
refined, romantic sentiment in delicate, refined, classic 
style. 

This was the first recognized literary revelation of the 
New World to the Old. In a previous generation, Edwards 
had made American theology a fact for all Calvinists to 
reckon with. The political philosophers of the Revolu- 
tion had made our political and legal thought matters 



Washington Irving 147 

which even the Old World could hardly neglect. When 
we come to pure Hterature, however, in which America 
should at last express to Europe what life meant to men of 
artistic sensitiveness living under the conditions of our 
new and emancipated society, what we find is little more 
than greater delicacy of form than existed in contemporary 
England. Irving is certainly a permanent hterary figure. 
What makes him so is not novelty or power, but charming 
refinement. 



Ill 

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

References 

Works: Novels (Mohawk Edition), 32 vols., New York: Putnam, 
1896. Cooper's other works are out of print; for their titles, see the 
bibliographies mentioned below. 

Biography and Criticism: T. R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore 
Cooper, Boston: Houghton, 1882 (aml); W. B. S. Clymer, James Feni- 
more Cooper, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1900. (B.B.) 

Bibliography: Foley, 59-63; Lounsbury's Cooper, 290-299. 

Selections: Carpenter, 153-171; Duyckinck, II, 113-117; *Stedman 
and Hutchinson, V, 138-183. 

In 1820, American literature, so far as it has survived, 
consisted of the novels of Brockden Brown, then ten years 
dead, and of Irving's Sketch Book, which had begun to 
appear the year before. Apart from these works, what 
had been produced in this country was obviously so imi- 
tative as to express only a sense on the part of our numer- 
ous writers that they ought to copy the eminent authors 
of England. In 1820 appeared the first work of a new 
novelist, soon to attain not only permanent reputation 
in America, but also general European recognition. This 
was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). 
Life. He was born in New Jersey. When he was about a 

year old his father, a gentleman of means, migrated to 
that region in Central New York where Cooperstown 
still preserves his name. Here the father founded 
the settlement where for the rest of his life he main- 

148 



Novel. 



James Fenimore Cooper 149 

tained a position of almost feudal superiority. Here, 
in a country so wild as to be almost primeval, Cooper 
was brought up. Before he was fourteen years old he 
went to Yale College ; but some academic trouble brought 
his career there to a premature end. The years between 
1806 and 1810 he spent at sea, first on a merchant vessel, 
afterwards as an officer in the navy. In 181 1, having 
married a lady of the Tory family of De Lancey, he re- 
signed his commission. 

After several years of inconspicuous life — he was living 
at the time in the country near New York City — he read 
some now forgotten English novel; and stirred by the 
notion that he could write a better, he rapidly produced the 
novel Precaution (1820). This was a tale of life in Eng- His First 
land, of which at the time Cooper knew very little. It had 
a measure of success, being mistaken for the anonymous 
work of some English woman of fashion. In the follow- 
ing year Cooper produced The Spy, an historical novel 
of the American Revolution, then less than fifty years 
past. In 1823 came The Pioneers, the first in publica- 
tion of his Leather- Stocking tales; and just at the begin- 
ning of 1824 appeared The Pilot, the first of his stories of 
the sea. The Last 0} the Mohicans, perhaps his master- 
piece, was published in 1826. In that year he went abroad, 
where he remained for seven years. He then came home, 
and thereafter resided mostly on the ancestral estate at 
Cooperstown. Peculiarities of temper kept him through- 
out his later years in chronic quarrels with the public, 
with his neighbors, and with almost everybody but some 
of his personal friends, who remained strongly attached 
to him. 

At the age of thirty, as we have seen. Cooper had never 



150 Literature in the Middle States 



published anything; he died at the age of sixty-two having 
written some ninety volumes. Of these hastily written 
works a number dealt with matters of fact; for one thing, 
with characteristic asperity and lack of tact, he published 
various comments on both America and England, in 
which he seemed chiefly animated by a desire to em- 
phasize those truths which would be least welcome to 

the people concerned. He 
wrote, too, a History of the 
Navy 0} the United States oj 
America (1839), which contrib- 
uted to his personal difficulties. 
Most of these contentious 
works, however, were pub- 
lished after 1832. Between 
1820 and 1832, meantime, 
Cooper had produced at least 
ten novels which have held 
their position in literature. 
What is more, these novels 
almost immediately attained 
world-wide reputation ; they 
Popularity were translated not only into French, but also into many 
Novds. other languages of continental Europe, in which they pre- 
serve popularity. Great as was his success at home and in 
England, indeed, it is sometimes said to have been exceeded 
by that which he has enjoyed throughout continental 
Europe. 

This great success is perhaps summarized in the fact 
that Cooper has been called the American Scott, and in- 
deed was so called in his own time, for his reputation was 
literally contemporary with Sir Walter's. The Spy ap- 




Jarnes Feiiimore Cooper 151 

peared in the same year with Kenilworth and The Pirate, cooper 



The Pilot in the year of Quentin Durward. Scott and 
Cooper, however, really belong to different categories of 
merit. Scott, saturated with the traditions of a brave 
old human world, was gifted with an imagination so ro- 
bust as to have invented in the historical novel a virtually 
new form of Uterature, and to have enlivened it with a 
host of characters so vital that among the creatures of 
English imagination his personages rank almost next to 
Shakspere's. When Cooper began to write, Waverley was 
already about six years old. In a certain sense he may 
therefore be said to have imitated Scott; it is doubtful, 
however, whether he was by any means so conscious of his 
model as Brockden Brown was of Godwin, or Irving of 
Goldsmith. The resemblance between Cooper and Scott 
lies chiefiy in the fact that each did his best work in fiction 
dealing with the romantic past of his own country. By 
just so much, then, as the past of Cooper's America was a 
slighter, less varied, less human past than that of Scott's 
England or Scotland, Cooper's work must remain inferior 
to Scott's in hurnan interest. Partly for the same reason, 
the range of character created by Cooper is far less wide 
than that brought into being by Sir Walter. Cooper, 
indeed, as the very difficulties of his later life would show, 
was temperamentally narrow in sympathy. To compare 
him with Scott, indeed, except for the matter of popu- 
larity, in which they have often been equal, is needlessly 
to belittle Cooper. Here we may better consider him in 
connection with his American contemporaries. 

When The Spy was published, the novels of Brockden 
Brown were already almost forgotten; and Irving had pro- 
duced only The Knickerbocker History and the admir- 



and 
Scott. 



152 Literature in the Middle States 

able essays of his Sketch Book. The Spy is an historical 
novel of the American Revolution, often conventional, 
but at the same time set in a vivid background ; for Cooper, 
actually living in the country where he laid his scenes, sin- 
cerely endeavored not only to revive the fading past, but 
Cooper's to do fuU justicc to both sides in that great conflict which 
grounds, disunited the English- speaking races. In The Pilot we 
have a somewhat similar state of things ; but here, instead 
of laying the scene on American soil, Cooper lays it for 
the first time in literature aboard an American ship. The 
Pilot is very uneven. The plot is conventionally trivial; 
and most of the characters are more so still. But Long 
Tom Cofhn is a living Yankee sailor; and when we come 
to the sea, with its endless variety of weather, and to sea- 
fights, such as that between the "Ariel" and the "Alac- 
rity," it would be hard to find anything better. If the 
plot and the characters had been half so good as the 
wonderful marine background in which they are set, 
the book would have been a masterpiece. 

Something similar may be said of the Leather-Stocking 
stories,* of which The Last 0} the Mohicans, published 
in 1826, is probably the best. The trivially conventional 
plots concern characters who, with the exception of 
Leatherstocking himself, are not particularly like any- 
thing recorded in human history. The woods and the 
inland waters, on the other hand, amid which the scenes 
of these stories unroll themselves, are true American 
forests and lakes and streams. It is hardly too much to 
say that Cooper introduced certain aspects of Nature 

* These are, in their order as successive chapters in the life of their 
hero: The Deerslayer (1841); The Last of the Mohicans (1826); The 
Pathfinder {1840); The Pioneers {1822)] The Prairie {182 j). 



James Fenimore Cooper 158 

unknown to literature before his time, and of a kind 
which could have been perceived and set forth only by an 
enthusiastic native of that newest of nations to which he 
was so devotedly attached. 

Though Cooper thoroughly loved his country, he saw cooper's 
in it traits which by no means delighted him. So in his 
Notions oj the Americans Picked Up by a Travelling 
Bachelor, published in 1828, when his popularity was at 
its height, he expressed concerning our countrymen views 
which may be summarized in the statement that Ameri- 
cans, though full of energy and other admirable quahties, 
have a blind passion for money-seeking, an undue respect 
for popular opinion, and an irrepressible tendency to brag. 
For this he was called Anglomaniac; his Anglomania, 
however, did not prevent him from writing just as frankly 
about the English, of whom his published views may 
similarly be summarized in the statement that the Eng- 
lish are not only the most efficiently powerful nation in the 
world, but also by far the most snobbish. Both nations 
resented these comments by bestowing upon Cooper in 
reputable reviews such epithets as "superlative dolt," "bil- 
ious braggart," "liar," "full jackass," "insect," "grub," 
and "reptile." 

The troubles in which he thus involved himself during 
his last twenty years were enhanced not only by those 
which sprang from his honest effort to be fair in his His- 
tory of the Navy, but by quarrels with neighbors at Coop- 
erstown, concerning the public use of some land to which 
he held a clear title, and by various infirmities of temper. 
Intensely aristocratic in personal feeling, he cherished the 
most democratic general sentiments, believing equally in 
the rights of man and in the vileness of any actual populace. 



154 Litet^ature in the Middle States 

In politics he was a Democrat, but he hated free trade as 
blindly as Tory squire ever loved the Corn Laws. One 
can begin to see why he wished no biography made of 
what he must have felt to be a life of misunderstanding 
and vexation. 
Summary. Yct, now that he has been half a century in his grave, 
little memory is left of his foibles or his troubles. The 
Cooper who survives in popular memory is the author of 
those wholesome novels of sea and of forest which were 
the first American writings to win and to keep wide popu- 
larity. In touching on them we remarked the extraordi- 
nary truthfulness of their background ; and this, probably, 
is the trait which gives them their highest positive value. 
It is hardly to so unusual a quality, however, that they have 
owed their popular vitality. Their plots, though conven- 
tional, are put together with considerable skill. In spite 
of prolixity one constantly feels curious to know what is 
coming next. In spite even of lifeless characters, this 
skilful handling of plot makes one again and again feel 
unexpected interest concerning what these personages are 
going to do or what is going to happen to them. As we 
have seen already, too, crucial episodes, such as the wreck 
of the "Ariel" in The Pilot, possess, in spite of careless 
phrasing, a vividness and a bravery sure to appeal to 
broad human temper. Cooper's commonplace plots, in 
short, are often interesting enough to atone for their pro- 
lixity; and whatever the conventionahty of his characters, 
the spirit of his books is vigorously brave and manly. 

Excellent as these traits are, however, they are not spe- 
cifically American. Another trait of Cooper's work, less 
salient, but just as constant, may fairly be regarded as 
national. From beginning to end of his writings there is 



James Fenimore Cooper 155 

hardly a passage which anybody would hesitate to put into coope- 



the hands of a child; nor does this purity seem studied. 
The scenes of his novels are often laid in very rough 
places, and as a natural consequence many of his char- 
acters and incidents are of a rough, adventurous kind; 
but, with a delicacy as instinctive as his robustness. Cooper 
avoids those phases of rough human life which are es- 
sentially base. 

Cooper lived until 1851, and Irving lived eight years 
longer. As both men wrote until they died, their work 
might evidently be held to extend to a later period than 
that in which we are considering them; for here we have 
treated them as almost contemporary with Brockden 
Brown, who died in 18 10. In another aspect, however, 
they belong very early in the history of American letters. 
In 1798, we remember, the year when Wordsworth and 
Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads, appeared also 
Brockden Brown's Wieland. In 1832 the death of Sir 
Walter Scott brought to an end that epoch of English let- 
ters which the Lyrical Ballads may be said to have opened. 
In that year Brown had long been dead; and both Irving 
and Cooper had still some years to write. The reputation 
of each, however, was virtually complete. Irving had 
already published his Knickerbocker History, his Sketch 
Book, his Bracebridge Hall, his Tales of a Traveller, his 
Life of Columbus, his Fall of Granada, and his Alhambra; 
nothing later materially increased his reputation. Cooper 
had published The Spy, The Pioneers, The Pilot, Lionel 
Lincoln, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, the Red 
Rover, the Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The Water Witch, and 
the Bravo. When Scott died, it thus appears. Cooper too 
had produced enough to make his reputation permanent. 



Instinctivt 
Purity. 



156 Literature in the Middle States 

The three writers whom we have considered — Brockden 
Brown, Irving, and Cooper — were the only Americans who 
between 1798 and 1832 achieved lasting names in prose. 
Though they form no school, though they are very different 
from one another, two or three things may be said of them 
in common. They all developed in the Middle States; 
the names of all are associated with the chief city of that 
region. New York. The most significant work of all 
assumed a form which in the general history of literatures 
comes not early but late, — prose fiction. This form, 
meantime, happened to be on the whole that which was 
most popular in contemporary England. 

Again, in the previous literature of America, if literature 
it may be called, two serious motives were expressed. In 
the first place, particularly in New England, there was 
a considerable development of theologic thought. A little 
later, partly in New England, but more in Virginia and in 
New York, there was admirable political writing. These 
two motives — the one characteristic of the earliest type 
of native American, the second of that second type which 
pohtically expressed itself in the American Revolution — 
may be regarded as expressions in this country of the two 
ideals most deeply inherent in our native language, — those 
of the Bible and of the Common Law. Whatever the ulti- 
mate significance of American writing during the seven- 
teenth or the eighteenth centuries, such of it as now re- 
mains worthy of attention is earnest in purpose, dealing 
either with the eternal destinies of mankind or with deep 
problems of pohtical conduct. 

Our first purely literary expression, on the other hand, 
shows a different temper. Neither Brown nor Irving nor 
Cooper has left us anything profoundly significant. All 



James Fenimore Cooper lo7 

three are properly remembered as writers of wholesome 
fiction; and the object of wholesome fiction is neither to 
lead men heavenward nor to teach them how to behave 
on earth; it is rather to please. There is a commonplace 
which divides great literature into the literature of knowl- 
edge, which enlarges the intellect, and that of power, 
which stimulates the emotions until they become living 
motives. Such work as Brockden Brown's or Irving's or 
Cooper's can hardly be put in either category. Theirs is 
rather a literature of wholesome pleasure. 

This prose on which we have now touched was the most 
important literature produced in New York, or indeed in 
America, during the period which was marked in England 
by everything between the Lyrical Ballads and the death 
of Scott. Even in America, however, the time had its 
poetry. At this we must now glance. 



IV 

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 

References 

BRYANT 

Works: Poetical Works, ed. Parke Godwin, 2 vols., New York: Apple- 
ton, 1883; Prose Writi7tgs, ed. Godwin, 2 vols., New York: Appleton, 
1884. 

Biography and Criticism: *Parke Godwin, A Biography 0} William 
Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from his Private Correspondence, 2 vols., 
New York: Appleton, 1883; John Bigelow, William Cullen Bryant, Bos- 
ton: Houghton, 1890; (aml) *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter III. 

Bibliography: Foley, 29-34. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 186-191; Griswold, Poetry, 171-183; 
Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 76; Stedman, 53-67; *Stedman and 
Hutchinson, V, 305-325. 

DRAKE AND HALLECK 

WoKKS: Drake's Culprit Fay, New York: Putnam, 1890; Halleck's 
Poetical Writings, with Extracts jrom those 0} Joseph Rodman Drake, ed. 
J. G. Wilson, New York: Appleton, 1869. 

Biography and Criticism: Halleck's Lije and Letters, ed. J. G. Wil- 
son, New York: Appleton, 1869. 

Bibliography: Foley, 74-75 and 107-108. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 205-207 and 209-212; Griswold, Poetry, 
204-210 and 212-218; Stedman, 36-40 and 42-47; *Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, V, 216-225 and 363-379. 

In the early summer of 1878 there died at New York, 
from a sunstroke received just after dehvering a speech 
at the unveihng of a monument in Central Park, William 
Cullen Bryant (i 794-1878), by far the most eminent 
man of letters in our chief city. The circumstances of 
his death show how thoroughly he retained his vitality 

158 



Willicmi Cullen Bryant 159 

to the end; and his striking personal appearance com- 
bined with the extreme physical activity which kept him 
constantly in the streets to make him a familiar local 
figure. Yet his first published work — a very precocious 
one, to be sure, — had appeared before Brockden Brown 
died, in the same year with Scott's Marmion; and this 
remote 1808 had seen the Quarterly Review founded in 
England, and Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. Bry- 
ant's "Thanatopsis" had been printed in 181 7, the year in 
which Byron wrote Manjred, in which Jane Austen died, 
in which Coleridge produced his Biographia Literaria, 
and Keats the first volume of his poems, and Mrs. Shelley 
her Frankenstein, and Moore his Lalla Rookh. A collected 
edition of Bryant's poems had appeared in 1821, the year 
when Keats died, when the first version of De Quincey's 
Opium-Eater came into existence, when Scott published 
Kenilworth and The Pirate, and Shelley Adonais. And in- 
cidentally Bryant was for a full half-century at the head of 
the New York Evening Post, which brought him the rare 
reward of a considerable personal fortune earned by a 
newspaper in which from beginning to end the editor 
could feel honest pride. As a journahst, indeed, Bryant 
belongs almost to our own time. As a poet, however, — 
and it is as a poet that we are considering him here, — he 
belongs to the earliest period of American letters. 

He was born, the son of a country doctor, at Gumming- Life, 
ton, a small town of Western Massachusetts, in 1794. At 
that time a country doctor, though generally poor, was, 
like the minister and the squire, an educated man, and a 
person of local eminence; and Dr. Bryant, who was oc- 
casionally a member of the General Gourt at Boston, came 
to have a considerable acquaintance among the better 



160 Literature in the Middle States 



sort of people in Massachusetts. The son was extremely 
precocious. When he was only thirteen years old, verses 
of his were printed in a country newspaper; and a year 
later, in 1808, his satire on President Jefferson, The Em- 
bargo^ was brought to Boston by his admiring father and 
actually published. The only particular merit of this 

poem is accuracy of rhyme 
and metre, a trait which Bry- 
ant preserved until the end. 
For a year or so the boy went 
to Williams College, but as 
his father was too poor to 
keep him there, he soon en- 
tered a lawyer's ofifice. Law, 
however, proved by no means 
congenial to him; he wanted 
to be a man of letters. In 
this aspiration his father sym- 
pathized; and when the son 
was twenty-three years of 
age, the father took to Bos- 
ton a collection of his manu- 
among which was "Thanatopsis," already six 




f^lf.(Mu^^^ 



scripts, 
years old. 

These manuscripts Dr. Bryant submitted to Mr. Wil- 
lard Phillips, one of the three editors of the North Ameri- 
can Review, then lately founded. Delighted with the 
verses, Phillips showed them to his colleagues, Mr. Richard 
Henry Dana and Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing. 
The story of the way in which these gentlemen received 
the poems throws hght on the condition of American let- 
ters in 181 7. According to Mr. Parke Godwin "they 



JVilliam Cullen Bryant KH 

listened attentively to his reading of them, when Dana, at 
the close, remarked with a quiet smile: 'Ah! Phillips, you 
have been imposed upon; no one on this side of the At- 
lantic is capable of writing such verses.' " Four years later, 
in 1 82 1, Bryant dehvered before the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society of Harvard College his longest poem, "The Ages"; 
during the same year he pubhshed in pamphlet form 
eight poems. There were only forty-four pages in all; 
but among the poems were both "The Waterfowl" and 
"Thanatopsis." The life of a country lawyer becoming 
more and more distasteful to him, he determined to move 
to town. He thought seriously of going to Boston, — a city 
with which at that time his affiliations were stronger tha,n 
with any other; but instead he cast in his lot with New 
York, to which he finally went in 1825. 

At that time Brockdcn Brown had been dead for fifteen 
years, and the reputations of Irving and of Cooper were 
estabhshed. At that time, too, there was in New York a. New York 
considerable literary activity of which the results are now *" ' ^^' 
pretty generally forgotten.* Almost the only survival of 
New York poetry before Bryant came there, indeed, is 
Samuel Woodworth's accidentally popular "Old Oaken 
Bucket." The name of James Kirke Paulding (1778- 
1860), to be sure, who was associated with Irving in Sal- 
magundi, and who subsequently wrote a number of novels, 
and other prose, is still faintly remembered; and so are the 
names rather than the actual work of two poets, Josefii 

* Whoever is curious to know something about it may well compare 
Rufus Wilmot Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America (1842), his Prose 
Writers of America (1847), his Female Poets of America (1849), and 
E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855), 
with Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature, 



162 Literature in the Middle States 

Rodman Drake (i 795-1820) and Fitz-Greene Halleck 
(1790-1867). 

Drake was a gentleman and a man of taste. He wrote 
several pretty things, among them a poem published after 
his death, entitled "The Culprit Fay " (1835). 'This con- 
ventional tale of some tiny fairies, supposed to haunt the 
Hudson River, is so much better than American poetry 
had previously been that one is at first disposed to speak 
of it enthusiastically. An obvious comparison puts it in 
true perspective. Drake's life happened nearly to coincide 
with that of Keats. The work of each was so early cut 
short by death, that it sometimes seems only an indica- 
tion of what they might have done; and the contrast be- 
tween these indications tells afresh the story of American 
letters. Keats, amid the full fervor of European experi- 
ence, produced immortal verse; Drake, whose whole life 
was passed amid the national inexperience of New York, 
produced only pretty fancies. 

Fitz-Greene Halleck, five years older, survived Drake 
by forty-seven years. If we except his " Marco Bozzaris," 
however, which was published in 1825, his only surviving 
lines are comprised in the first stanza of his poem on the 
death of Drake, written in 1820: — 

" Green be the turf above thee, 
Friend of my better days! 
None knew thee but to love thee 
Nor named thee but to praise." 

In 181 1 Halleck and Drake contributed to the New 
York Evening Post a series of poetical satires entitled 
"The Croaker Papers;" and Halleck published a mildly 
satirical poem entitled Fanny. In 1827 he brought 
out Alnwick Castle, and Other Poems. In 1832 his 



William Cullen Bryant 103 

poetic career was virtually closed by his acceptance of a 
clerical position in the employ of Mr. John Jacob Astor. 
The general insignificance of New York letters at the time 
when Bryant first came to the town is in no way better 
typified than by the fact that literary work so inconsid- 
erable as Halleck's has been deemed worthy of a bronze 
statue, still sitting cross-legged in the Mall of Central 
Park. 

Compared with such work as this, there is no wonder Evenness 
that poems like " Thanatopsis " and "The Waterfowl" B.y^nt-s 
seemed to the early editors of the North American Review work, 
too good to be native; and, as we have seen, Bryant's life 
and activity were so prolonged that it is hard to remember 
how nearly his poetical work was accomplished at the 
beginning of his career. It was not all produced at once, 
of course; but, as is often the case with precocious ex- 
cellence, — with men, for example, like his contemporaries, 
Landor and Whittier, — even though he rarely fell below 
his own first level, he hardly ever surpassed it. This is 
clearly seen if we compare the famihar concluding lines 
of "Thanatopsis," published before he was twenty-seven, 
with a passage of about equal length from "Among the 
Trees," pubhshed after he was seventy. The former 
lines run thus: — 

"So live, that when thy summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan, which moves 
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
Thou go not, like a quarry-slave at night, 
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." 



164 Literature in the Middle States 

The latter lines are these: — 

"Ye have no history. I ask in vain 
Who planted on the slope this lofty group 
Of ancient pear-trees that with spring-time burst 
Into such a breadth of bloom. One bears a scar 
Where the quick lightning scorched its trunk, yet still 
It feels the breath of Spring, and every May 
Is white with blossoms. Who it was that laid 
Their infant roots in earth, and tenderly 
Cherished the delicate sprays, I ask in vain, 
Yet bless the unknown hand to which I owe 
The annual festival of bees, these songs 
Of birds within their leafy screen, these shouts 
Of joy from children gathering up the fruit 
Shaken in August from the willing boughs." 

The former of these passages is the work of an inexperi- 
enced country boy; the latter, by the same hand, is the 
work of an old man who had made a fortune as the most 
successful journaHst in New York; but, so far as internal 
evidence goes, the latter might almost have been written 
first. Beyond doubt, as an American poet Bryant really 
belongs to the generation contemporary with Sir Walter 
Scott. 

In the year of Scott's death, indeed, — that same 1832 
which saw in England the passage of the Reform Bill and 
in America the Nullification Act of South Carolina and , 
President Jackson's Bank Veto, — Bryant had already been 
for four years at the head of the Evening Post, and the first 
considerable edition of his poems appeared both in Eng- 
land and in America. Nothing which he wrote later, 
except perhaps his translations, — some admirable versions 
of Spanish lyrics, which are said to have attracted many 
young eyes to fascinating romantic vistas, and far later 



William Cullen Bryant 1()5 

his well-known rendering of Homer — will much alter 
the impression produced by his early volume. The life- 
long evenness of his work seems to justify reference at this 
point to what he wrote about poetry many years later. In 
1 87 1, as editor of a Library oj Poetry and Song, he stated 
at considerable length what he conceived to be the most 
important qualities of lasting poetry. "The best poetry," 
he says, — "that which takes the strongest hold on the 
general mind, not in one age only but in all ages, — is that 
which is always simple and always luminous." 

Simple and luminous Bryant was from beginning to end. 
For this simple luminosity he paid the price of that de- 
liberate coolness which Lowell thus satirized in the Fable 
jor Critics, of 1848: — 

"There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, 
As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified. 
Save when by reflection 't is kindled o' nights 
With a semblance of tlame by the chill Northern Lights. 
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard.of your nation 
(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation), 
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on. 
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on, — 
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on: 
Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em, 
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm; 
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul. 
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole." 

If Bryant's careful attention to luminosity, however, pre- 
vented him from ever being passionate, and gave his work 
the character so often mistaken for commonplace, it never 
deprived him of tender delicacy. Take, for example, 
"The Death of the Flowers," of which the opening line — 

"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year" — 



166 Literature in the Middle States 

is among his most familiar. The last two stanzas run as 
follows : — 

"And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will 

come. 
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home; 
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are 

still, 
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill. 
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he 

bore, 
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more. 

"And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died. 
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side. 
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf, 
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief; 
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours, 
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers." 

To a generation familiar with all the extravagances of 
nineteenth-century romanticism, a feeling so deliberately 
restrained, so close to sentimentality, may well seem un- 
impassioned. But one cannot dwell on these lines with- 
out feeling genuine sweetness of temper, or without 
finally discerning, in what at first seems chilly deliberation 
of phrase, what is rather a loving care for every syllable. 

The allusion in the last stanza is to the early death from 
consumption of Bryant's sister. Only a few years before 
his father had died of the same disease. So he had per- 
sonal reason for melancholy. As one looks through his 
work, however, one is apt to wonder whether, even if his 
life had been free from personal bereavement, his verse 
might not still have hovered sentimentally about the dead. 
His most successful poem, "Thanatopsis," was apparently 
written before death had often come near him; and it is 



. William Cullen Bryant 107 

hardly excessive to say that if a single name were sought 
for his collected works, from beginning to end, a version 
of that barbarous Greek title might be found suitable, and 
the whole volume fairly entitled " GHmpses of the Grave." 
Of course he touched on other things; but he touched on 
mortality so constantly as to make one feel regretfully sure 
that whenever he felt stirred to poetry his fancy started 
for the Valley of the Shadow of Death. In this, of course, 
he was not peculiar. The subject had such fascination 
for eighteenth-century versifiers that Blair and Young 
made it the chief motive for a considerable body of 
verse, and in 1751 Gray's Elegy crowned this school of 
poetry with an undying masterpiece. This underlying 
impulse of Bryant's poetry, we thus perceive, was general 
in the middle of the eighteenth century; yet Bryant's style, 
distinctly affected by that of Cowper, and still more by 
that of ' Wordsworth, clearly belongs to the nineteenth. 
Bryant thus reverses the relation of substance to style 
which we remarked in the prose of his contemporary, 
Irving. Imbued with nineteenth- century romantic temper, 
Irving wrote in the classical style of the century before; 
Bryant, writing in the simple, luminous style of his own 
century, expressed a somewhat formal sentimentality 
which had hardly characterized vital work in England 
for fifty years. 

Such was the eldest of our nineteenth-century poets, summary 
the first whose work was recognized abroad. He has never 
been widely popular; and in the course of a century whose 
poetry has been chiefly marked by romantic passion, he 
has tended to seem more and more commonplace. But 
those who think him commonplace forget his historical 
significance. His work was really the first which proved 



168 Literature in the Middle States 

to England what native American poetry might be. The 
Old World was looking for some wild manifestation of this 
new, hardly apprenended, western democracy. Instead, 
what it found in Bryant, the one poetic contemporary of 
Irving and Cooper whose writings have lasted, was fas- 
tidious over-refinement, tender sentimentality, and per- 
vasive luminosity. Refinement, in short, and conscious 
refinement, groups Bryant with Irving, with Cooper, and 
with Brockden Brown. In its beginning the American 
literature of the nineteenth century was marked rather 
by delicacy than by strength, or by any such outburst of 
previously unphrased emotion as on general principles 
democracy might have been expected to excite. 



V 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

References 

Works: Works, ed. Stedman and Woodberry, lo vols., Chicago: 
Stone and Kimball, 1894-95; Works ("Virginia Edition") cd. J. A. 
Harrison, 17 vois.. New York: Crowell, 1902. 

Biography and Criticism: *G. E. Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe, 
Houghton, 1885 (aml); J. A. Harrison, Life and Letters of Edgar Allan 
Poe, 2 vols.. New York: Crowell, 1903; *Stedman, Poets of America, 
Chapter vii; L. E. Gates, Studies and Appreciations, New York: Mac- 
millan, 1900, pp. 110-128. 

Bibliography: Stedman and Woodberry, X, 267-281; J. A. Harri- 
son's Life, I, 431-455. 

Selections: Carpenter, 276-302; Duyckinck, II, 539-545; Griswold, 
Poetry, 470-478; Griswold, Prose, 524-530; Stedman, 144-151; *Sted- 
man and Hutchinson, VI, 429-460. 

In April, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) pub- 
lished in Godey^s Lady^s Book an elaborate article on Will- 
iam CuUen Bryant. In the six following numbers of the 
same periodical, appeared that series of comments on the 
literary personages of the day which were collected under 
the name of the Literati (1850). The personal career of 
Poe was so erratic that one can hardly group him with' 
any definite literary school. It seems, however^ more 
than accidental that his principal critical work concerned 
the contemporary literature of New York; and though 
he was born in Boston and passed a good deal of his life; 
in Virginia, he spent his literary years rather more in New 
York than anywhere else. Accordingly this seems the 
most fitting place to consider him. 

169 



170 Literature in the Middle States 



From the beginning his career was erratic. His father, 
the son of a Revolutionary soldier, had gone wrong and 
brought up on the stage; his mother was an Enghsh ac- 
tress of whom Httle is known. The pair, who chanced to 
be in Boston when their son was born, died when he was 
still a little child. At the age of two, he was adopted by 
a gentleman of Richmond, Virginia, named Allan, who 

soon took him to Europe, where 
he remained from 1815 to 1820. 
In 1826 he was for a year at the 
University of Virginia, where his 
career was brought to an end 
by a gambling scrape, which in 
turn brought almost to an end 
his relations with his adopted 
father. In 1827 his first verses 
were pubhshed, a little volume 
entitled Tamerlane and Other 
Poems. Then he drifted into 
the army, and a temporary 
reconciliation with Mr. Allan got him into the Military 
Academy at West Point, from which in 1831 he was 
dismissed. After that he always lived from hand to 
mouth, supporting himself as a journahst and as a con- 
tributor to numberless periodicals which have long since 
disappeared. His Manuscript Found in a Bottle (1833), 
procured him for a while the editorship of the Southern 
Literary Messenger, published at Richmond and for many 
years the most successful hterary periodical of the South. 
In 1835 he married a charming but penniless girl, a rela- 
tive of his own. In 1839 and 1840 he edited the Gentle- 
man^ s Magazine in Philadelphia; from 1840 to 1842 he 




J-. ^0^ 



Edgar Allan Poe 171 

edited Graham'' s Magazine in New York; his general 
career was that of a Hterary hack. In 1847, after a life 
of distressing poverty, his wife died; two years later Poe 
himself died miserably. 

Born fifteen years later than Bryant and dead twenty- 
nine years earlier, Poe, now more than fifty years in his 
grave, seems to belong to an earlier period of our letters; 
but really, as we have seen, Bryant's principal work was 
done before 1832. At that time Poe had published only 
three volumes of verse; his lasting prose came somewhat 
later; in fact, the permanent work of Poe may be said to 
coincide with the first twelve years of the Victorian epoch. 
In 1838, the year of Arthur Gordon Pym, Dickens was at Poe's 
work on Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nicklehy ; and Carlyle's contlm- 
French Revolution was a new book. In 1849, when Poe poraries. 
died, Thackeray's Vanity Fair and the first two volumes 
of Macaulay's History had lately appeared; Dickens was 
publishing David Copperfield, and Thackeray Pendennis; 
and Ruskin brought out his Seven Lamps 0} Architecture. 
Had Poe survived to Bryant's years, he would have out- 
lived not only Bryant himself but Emerson and Hawthorne 
and Longfellow and Lowell, and indeed almost every lit- 
erary contemporary except Holmes. 

The very mention of these names is enough to call to 
mind a distinction between the career of Poe and that of 
almost every other American whose literary reputation 
has survived from the days when he was writing. The 
men on whom we have already touched were personally of 
the better sort, either by birth or by achieved position. So 
in general were the chief men of letters who made the 
Renaissance of New England the most important fact in 
American literary history. Poe, on the other hand, was 



172 Literature in the Middle States 

always a waif and a stray, essentially a Bohemian. There 
was in his nature something which made futile the effort 
of that benevolent Virginian gentleman to adopt him into 
the gentler classes of America. In his lifetime, there can 
be little doubt, Poe must consequently have seemed per- 
sonally inferior to most of his eminent contemporaries in 
American letters. Yet now that all are dead, he begins, 
to seem quite as important as any. : 

The historical position of Poe in American letters can 
be seen by glancing at his already mentioned papers, the 
Literati. It is worth while to name the thirty-eight per- 
sons, then mostly living in New York and certainly con- 
tributing to the New York periodicals of the moment, 
whom Poe thought considerable and interesting enough 
for notice. Here is the hst: George Bush, George H. 
Colton, N. P. Willis, William M. Gillespie, Charles F. 
Briggs, William Kirkland, John W. Francis, Anna Cora 
Mowatt, George B. Cheever, Charles Anthon, Ralph Hoyt, 
The Guhan C. Verplanck, Freeman Hunt, Piero Maroncelh, 

Laughton Osborn, Fitz- Greene Halleck, Ann S. Stephens, . 
Evert A. Duyckinck, Mary Gove, James Aldrich, Thomas' 
Dunn Brown, Henry Cary, Christopher Pearse Cranch, 
Sarah Margaret Fuller, James Lawson, Caroline M. Kirk- 
land, Prosper M. Wetmore, Emma C. Embury, Epes 
Sargent, Frances Sargent Osgood, Lydia M. Child, Ehza- 
beth Bogart, Catherine M. Sedgwick, Lewis Gaylord 
Clark, Anne C. Lynch, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Mary E. 
Hewitt, and Richard Adams Locke. In this hst there is 
one name which we have already found worthy of a glance, 
— that of Fitz-Greene Halleck. There is another which 
we have mentioned in notes, — that of Evert A. Duyckinck. i 
There are two at which we shall certainly glance later, — 



Work. 



Edgar Allan Poc 17'3 

those of N. P. Willis and Sarah Margaret Fuller, And 
there are two or three which we may mention, — those of 
Mrs. Child, of Lewis Gaylord Clark, and of Charles Fenno 
Hoffman. The very names of the other "Literati" are 
generally forgotten. 

Our chief reason for recalling them is not to remind 
ourselves of what they happened to be publishing when 
Poe's best work was done; it is rather to point out why a 
considerable part of Poe's best work has itself been for- 
gotten. His critical writings * are the only ones in which other 
he shows how he could deal with actual fact ; and in deal- 
ing with actual fact he proved himself able. Though 
some of the facts he dealt with, however, were worthy of 
his pen, — he was among the first, for example, to recognize 
the merit of Tennyson and of Mrs. Browning,^most of 
them in the course of fifty years have proved insignificant. 
For all this, they existed at the moment. Poe was a jour- 
nalist, who had to write about what was in the air; and he 
wrote about it so well that in certain aspects this critical 
work seems his best. He dabbled a little in philosophy, 
of course, particularly on the aesthetic side; but he had 
neither the spiritual insight which must underlie serious 
philosophizing, nor the scholarly training which must 
precede lasting, solid thought. What he did possess to a 
rare degree was the temper of an enthusiastic artist, who 
genuinely enjoyed and welcomed whatever in his own art, 
poetry, he found meritorious. He dealt with questions of 
fine art in a spirit which if sometimes narrow, often dog- 
matic, and never scholarly, is sincere, fearless, and gen- 
erally eager in its impulsive recognition of merit. 

Take, for example, a stray passage from the Literati, — 

!" Collected in Vols. VI-VIU of Stedman and Woodberry's edition. 



174 Literature in the Middle States 

Mrs. his enthusiastic criticism of Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, 

Osgood. ^ jg^^y whose work never fulfilled the promise which Poe 
discerned in it: — 

"Whatever be her theme, she at once extorts from it its whole 
essentiality of grace. Fanny EUsler has been often lauded; true 
poets have sung her praises; but we look in vain for anything written 
about her, which so distinctly and vividly paints her to the eye as the 
, . . quatrains which follow: — 

'"She comes — the spirit of the dance! 

And but for those large eloquent eyes, 
Where passion speaks in every glance. 
She'd seem a wanderer from the skies. 

" 'So light that, gazing breathless there, 
Lest the celestial dream should go. 
You'd think the music in the air 
Waved the fair vision to and fro; 

"'Or that the melody^ s sweet flow 

Within the radiant creature played. 
And those soft wreathing arms oj snow 
And white sylph jeet the music made.^ 

"This is, indeed, poetry — and of the most unquestionable kind — 
poetry truthful in the proper sense — that is to say, breathing of 
Nature. There is here nothing forced or artificial — no hardly sus- 
tained enthusiasm. The poetess speaks because she feels, and what 
she feels; but then what she feels is felt only by the truly poetical."* 

This passage deserves our attention both as containing 
an unusually good fragment of the long-forgotten poetry 
produced in Poe's New York, and as indicating the 
temper in which Poe approached contemporary litera- 
ture. To his mind the only business of a poet was to make 

* Stedman and Woodberry's edition, VIII, 104-106. The italics 
are Poe's. 



Edgar Allan Poe 175 

things of beauty. If in what professed to be poetry he 
found ugly things, he unhesitatingly condemned them; 
if he found anything which seemed beautiful, nobody 
could welcome it more eagerly. Poe really loved his art; 
and whatever his lack of training, he had a natural, in- 
stinctive, eager perception of beauty. This, too, he set 
forth in a style always simple and clear, always free from 
affectation or mannerism, and always marked by a fine 
sense of rhythm. All these merits appear saliently in 
those portions of his work which deal with actual fact. 

His philosophical writings seem more suspicious. As 
a journalist Poe sometimes deliberately hoaxed the pubhc; 
and when you read such papers as his " Poetic Principle," 
his "Rationale of Verse," or his "Philosophy of Composi- 
tion," it is hard to feel sure that he is not gravely hoaxing 
you. On the whole, he probably was not. In his work of 
this kind one feels intense ingenuity, total lack of scholar- 
ship, and a temper far from judicial. The traits which 
make Poe's occasional criticisms excellent — swiftness of 
perception and fineness of taste — are matters not of train- 
ing but of temperament. 

Temperament, indeed, of a markedly individual kind is Tales and 
what gives lasting character and vitality to the tales and 
the poems by which he has become permanently known. 
Both ahke are instantly to be distinguished from the criti- 
cal work at which we have glanced by the fact that they 
never deal with things which he beHeved actually to exist, 
whether in this world or in the next. Poe's individual and 
powerful style, to be sure, full of what seems hke vivid- 
ness, constantly produces "that willing suspension of dis- 
belief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith;" but 
the futile attempts to illustrate his work prove that fictions 



176 Literature in the Middle States 

even so vivid as Usher and the Lady Madehne and the 
unearthly house of their doom are things which no one can 
translate into visual terms without demonstrating their 
unreality. Yet, for all this unreality, there hovers around 
them a mood, a temper, an impalpable but unmistakable 
quality, which could hardly have emanated from any 
other human being than Edgar Allan Poe. 
individu- This individuahty is hard to define. One or two 
^^*^^' things about it, however, seem clear. In tales and poems 

alike he is most characteristic when dealing with mys- 
teries ; and though to a certain point these mysteries, often 
horrible, are genuinely mysterious, they reveal no trace of 
spiritual insight, no sense of the eternities which lie be- 
yond human perception. Excellent in their way, one 
cannot but feel them to be melodramatic. From begin- 
ning to end Poe had that inextricable combination of 
meretriciousness and sincerity which marks the tempera- 
ment of actors in general. 

Yet genius he certainly had, and to no small degree in 
that excellent form which has been described as "an in- 
finite capacity for taking pains." In his tales, now of 
melodramatic mystery, again of elaborate ingenuity, one 
feels not only his constant power of imagination, one feels 
also masterly precision of touch. As you read over and 
over again both Poe's verse and his prose, particularly if 
you read aloud, you will feel more and more that almost 
every vowel, every consonant, and more surely still every 
turn of the rhythm which places the accent so definitely 
where the writer means it to fall, indicates not only a 
rare sense of form, but a still more rare power of 
expression. 

They indicate more than this, too. Whether the things 



Edgar Allan Poe 177 

which Poe wished to express were worth his pains is not 
the question. He knew what they were, and he unfeign- 
edly wished to express them. He had almost in perfection 
a power more frequently shown by skilful melodramatic 
actors than by men of letters, — the power of assuming an 
intensely unreal mood and of so setting it forth as to make 
us for the moment share it unresistingly. This power one 
feels perhaps most palpably in the peculiar melody of his 
verse. The "Haunted Palace" may be stagey, but there 
is something in its lyric quality — that quahty whereby 
poetry impalpably but unmistakably performs the office 
best performed by pure music — which throws a reader into 
a mood almost too subtle for words. 

In the strenuousness of Poe's artistic conscience we 
found a trait more characteristic of America than of Eng- 
land, — a trait which is perhaps involved in the national 
self-consciousness of our country. His general purity of 
feeling, which might hardly have been expected from the 
circumstances of his personal career, is equally charac- 
teristic of his America. It is allied, perhaps, with that 
freedom from actuality which we have seen to characterize 
his most apparently vivid work. The world which bred 
Poe was a world whose national life was still inexperienced. 

Intensely individual, and paradoxically sincere, Poe Summary, 
set forth a peculiar range of mysterious though not 
significant emotion. In the fact that this emotion, even 
though insignificant, was mysterious, is a trait which we 
begin to recognize as characteristically American, at least 
at that moment when American life meant something else 
than wide human experience. There is something char- 
acteristically American, too, in the fact that Poe's work 
gains its effect from artistic conscience, an ever present 



178 Literature in the Middle States 

sense of form. Finally, there is something characteris- 
tically American in Poe's instinctive delicacy. Poe's chief 
merits, in brief, prove merits of refinement. Even 
through a time so recent as his, refinement of temper, 
conscientious sense of form, and instinctive neglect of 
actual fact remained the most characteristic traits, if not 
of American life, at least of American letters. 



VI 

THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 

References 
the knickerbocker school 

Works: The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, 60 vols., 
New York, 1833-62; The Knickerbocker Gallery: A Testimonial to the 
Editor oj the Knickerbocker Magazine from its Contributors, New York: 
Hueston, 1855. 

Biography and Criticism: Duyckinck and Griswold, passim. The 
Knickerbockers, by Henry van Dyke, is announced in the series of 
"National Studies in American Letters" (New York: Macmillan). 

Selections: As above; also Stedman and Hutchinson (see Index, 
Vol. XI, under the various names). 



Works: No complete edition. "The thirteen volumes in uniform style, 
issued by Charles Scribner from 1849 to 1859, form as nearly a complete 
edition of Willis's prose since 1846 as is ever likely to be made" (Beers, 
Willis, p. 353). There is a complete edition of Willis's Poems, New York: 
Clark & Maynard, 1868. A very convenient volume of selections is the 
Prose Writings of Nathaniel Parker Willis, edited by H. A. Beers, New 
York: Scribner, 1885. 

Biography and Criticism: H. A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 
Boston: Houghton, 1885 (aml). 

Bibliography: Foley, 322-325; *Beers, Willis, 353-356. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 440-443; Griswold, Prose, 485-494; Gris- 
wold, Poetry, 372-378; Stedman, 102-106; *Stedman and Hutchinson, 
VI, 256-269. 

In the course of our glances at Poe we had occasion to 
recognize the existence of an extensive, though now for- 
gotten, periodical literature, — Godey^s Ladfs Book, The 

179 



Knicker 
bocker. 



180 Literature in the Middle States 

Southern Literary Messenger, Graham's Magazine, and the 
like, — which carried on the impulse toward periodical 
pubhcation already evident in the time of Brockden Brown. 
Throughout the older regions of America such things 
sprang up, flourished for a Httle while, and withered, in 
weed-like profusion. So far as these periodicals were 
literary, they were intensely conventional and sentimental. 
In brief, they are another proof of what inevitable waste 
must accompany any period of artistic achievement. 

In 1833 there was founded in New York the magazine 
in which this phase of literary activity may be said to 
The have culminated. The Knickerbocker thus deserves more 

attention than its positive merit would warrant. It was 
founded the year after Bryant brought out the first consid- 
erable collection of his poems, — that 1832 which was 
marked in English history by the Reform Bill and in Eng- 
lish literature by the death of Scott. The chief founder 
of the Knickerbocker was Charles Fenno Hoffman 
(1806-1884), a gentleman of New York whom Poe re- 
corded among the Literati of 1846, who published a num- 
ber of novels and poems, and whose career sadly closed 
with an insanity which, beginning in 1849, ^^P^ him for a 
full thirty-five years in the seclusion where he died. Dur- 
ing its thirty years or so of existence the Knickerbocker 
became not only the most conspicuous, but also the oldest 
periodical of its class in the United States. Though Poe's 
Literati were not all contributors to it, their names fairly 
typify the general character of its staff, toward the end of 
the '40s. 

In 1854 its editor was Lewis Gaylord Clark. As the 
twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the magazine 
was approaching, it was proposed that "the surviving 



The Knickerbocker School 181 

writers for the Knickerbocker should each furnish, 
gratuitously, an article, and that the collection should be 
published in a volume of tasteful elegance, of which the 
entire proceeds should be devoted to the building, on the 
margin of the Hudson, of a cottage, suitable for the 
home of a man of letters, who, Hke Mr. Clark, is 
also a lover of rural life." The book, which is entitled 
the Knickerbocker Gallery, was published early in 1855. 

To it Irving contributed some notes from a common- The 
place book of the year 182 1. Bryant sent some verses on fo^ke?"^' 
"A Snow Shower"; and Halleck a poetical "Epistle to Gaiiery. 
Clark." There are also contributions from New England : 
Holmes sent a four-page poem entitled "A Vision of the 
Housatonic"; Fields sent an "Invitation to our Cottage 
Home," in sixteen lines of innocent blank verse; Long- 
fellow contributed a poem, "The Emperor's Bird's-Nest"; 
and Lowell sent his verse on "Masaccio in the Brancacci 
Chapel" at Florence. The other contributors, mostly 
either resident in New York or closely associated with that 
city, may be taken as fairly typical of that phase in the 
letters of New York which has sometimes been called the 
Knickerbocker School. Some of their names have sur- 
vived; those, for example, of George Henry Boker, of 
Bayard Taylor, of John G. Saxe, of Henry Theodore 
Tuckerman, of George William Curtis, and — an unex- 
pected person to find in such company — of William H. 
Seward. But of all the names in the book, the most char- 
acteristic of the period is Nathaniel Parker Willis 
(1806-1867). 

W^illis was born at Portland, Maine, where his father, a wiuis. 
professional journalist, was an ardent member of the old 
Congregational communion to which the dialect of New 



182 Literature in the Middle States 



Letters 

from 

Abroad. 



England long gave the name of "orthodox." When the 
son was a mere boy, the father removed to Boston, and 
then became a deacon in the Park Street Church, perhaps 
the most rigidly orthodox of all the Boston churches. 
Life as the son of a Calvinistic deacon in the Unitarian 
city was so little to young Willis's taste that, after he had 
graduated from Andover and Yale and had tried maga- 
zine work in Boston with small 
success, he was glad to go to 
New York in the summer of 
1831. 

In the autumn of 1831 he be- 
came associated with George 
P. Morris (1802-1864), — now 
remembered only as the author 
of a once popular sentimental 
poem beginning "Woodman, 
spare that tree," — in the.con-^ 
duct of a periodical called the 
New York Mirror. Between 
them they hit upon a plan of 
sending Willis abroad, from 
whence he should write regular European letters ; so to Eu- 
rope he went at the age of twenty-five. There he was made 
much of by important people, and his letters to the New 
York Mirror related his social experiences with what was 
sometimes held undue detail. In 1846, having returned 
to America, Willis started the Home Journal and, like 
Irving, retired to a country-place on the banks of the 
Hudson River. 

In Willis's palmy days, he was the most popular Ameri- 
can writer out of New England. He dashed ofl all sorts 




'''^■^^.^ 



The Knickerbocker School 183 

of things with great ease, — not only such descriptions of 
life and people as formed the staple of his contributions 
to the Mirror, but poems and stories, and whatever else 
belongs to occasional periodical writing. Tliroughout, 
his prose style had a rather provoking kind of jaunty 
triviality. 

Work so slight may seem hardly worth emphasis. As 
time passes, however, Willis appears more and more the 
most characteristic New York man of letters between 1832 
and the Civil War, — the most typical of the school which 
flourished throughout the career of the Knickerbocker insignifi 
magazine. The earlier writers whom we have considered wiiiis's 
were all imitative, or at least their work seems reminiscent. ^°''^- 
Brockden Brown is reminiscent of Godwin, Irving of Gold- 
smith, Cooper of Scott, Bryant of Cowper and Wordsworth, 
and so on. In a similar way Willis may be said to remind 
one of Leigh Hunt, and perhaps here and there of Ben- 
jamin Disraeli, and Bulwer. The contrast of these last 
names with those of the earlier models tells the story. As 
men of letters, Godwin and Goldsmith and Scott and 
Cowper and Wordsworth are distinctly more serious 
than Bulwer and Disraeli and Leigh Hunt. The merits 
of the former group are solid; those of the latter are too 
slight to bear dilution. As a descriptive journahst, WiUis 
is still worth reading. His letters from abroad give 
pleasant and vivid pictures of European life in the '30s; 
his Letters from Under a Bridge give pleasant pictures 
of country life in our Middle States a little later; but 
when it comes to anything like literature, one can hardly 
avoid the conviction that he had little to say. 

In the work of the earlier New York school, and even in 
the work of Poe, we have already remarked, nothing was 



184 Literature in the Middle States 

produced which profoundly concerned either the eter- 
Summary. nities or the practical conduct of life. The literature of 
Brockden Brown, of Irving, of Cooper, and of Poe is only 
a literature of pleasure, possessing, so far as it has excel- 
lence at all, only the excellence of conscientious refine- 
ment. Willis, too, so far as his work may be called litera- 
ture, made nothing higher than Hterature of pleasure; and 
for all the bravery with which he worked throughout his 
later life, one cannot help feeling in his writings, as well 
as in some of the social records of his earlier years, a pal- 
pable falsity of taste. He was a man of far wider social 
experience than Bryant or Cooper, probably indeed than 
Irving himself. Yet, after all, one feels in him rather 
the quality of a dashing adventurer, of an amiable, honora- 
ble Bohemian, than such secure sense of personal dignity 
as marked Bryant and Irving and their contemporaries 
in New England. A school of letters in which a man of 
Willis's quality could attain the eminence which for years 
made him conspicuous was certainly declining. 

In brief, this school, which began in 1798 with the work 
of Brockden Brown and persisted throughout the life- 
time of Sir Walter Scott in the writings of Irving, of Cooper, 
and of Bryant, never dealt with deeply significant matters. 
Almost from the time when Bryant first collected his poems, 
the literature made in New York and under its influence 
became less and less important. New York newspapers, 
to be sure, of which the best examples are the Evening 
Post and the Tribune, were steadily gaining in merit and 
influence; but literature pure and simple was not. If we 
may hold Poe to have belonged to the general phase of 
American literary activity which we have been consider- 
ing, — the only phase which during the first half of the nine- 



The Knichcrhocher School 185 

teenth century developed itself outside of New England, — 
we may say that this literary activity reached its acme in 
the work of Poe, itself for all its merit not deeply signiiicant. 
And even in Poe's time, and still more surely a little later, 
the literature of which he proves the most important mas- 
ter declined into such good-humored trivialities as one 
finds in the Knickerbocker Gallery and in the life and work 
of Willis. By the middle of the nineteenth century the 
literary impulse of the Middle States had proved abortive. 
For the serious literature of America we must turn to New 
England. 



BOOK V 

THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW 
ENGLAND 



BOOK V 

THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW 
ENGLAND 



SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW ENGLAND 

References 

Early New England Life: On the history of New England, see the 
references at the head of Chapter iii of Book I and Chapter iii of 
I5()(jk II; many of these references concern New England life and man- 
ners. See also, on colonial and provincial life, J.R.Lowell, "New Eng- 
land Two Centuries Ago " (Wks., Riverside Edition, I); W. B. Weeden, 
Economic and Social History of New England, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 
iSqo; H. C. Lodge, A Short History of the English Colonies in America, 
New York: Harper, 1881, especially Chapter xxii; and the various 
hooks In- Mrs. Alice Morse Earle. 

Later New England Life: H. B. Stowe, Oldtown Folks, Boston, 
i36o; Whittier, Snow-Bound; Lowell, "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" 
(Wks., Riverside Edition, I, 43-99), E. E. Hale, A New England Boyhood 
(Wks., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1S98-1Q01, VI, 1-208); and the 
various writings of Sarah Ornc Jcwctt and Mary Wilkins. 

From the time, shortly after 1720, when FrankHn left 
Boston, where Increase and Cotton Mather were still 
preaching, we have paid little attention to that part of the 
country. For during the seventy-two years which inter- 
vened between Cotton Mather's death and the nineteenth 
century, Boston was of less literary importance than it 

189 



■■•■a io 



of New 
England 



190 The Renaissance of New England 

was before or than it has been since. To understand its 
revival, we must call to mind a httle more particularly 
some general characteristics of New England. 
Isolation Boston, whose geographical position has made it the 

principal city of that region, may be distinguished from 
most American cities by the fact that, comparatively speak- 
ing, it is not on the way anywhere. The main lines of 
travel from abroad to-day come to the port of New York. 
People bound thence for Washington proceed through 
Philadelphia and Baltimore; people bound westward are 
pretty sure to trend toward Chicago; people going south- 
west pass through St. Louis or New Orleans; people 
going around the world generally sail from San Francisco; 
but the only people who are apt to make the excursion from 
New York to Boston are those who do so for that purpose. 
Of course, the ease of intercommunication nowadays com- 
bines with several other causes to disguise this isolation 
of the capital city of New England. All the same, isola- 
tion really characterizes not only the city, but the whole 
region of which it is the natural centre. 

This physical isolation was somewhat less pronounced 
when the English-speaking settlements in America were 
confined to the fringe of colonies along the Atlantic sea- 
board. Even then, however, a man proceeding by land 
from Boston to Philadelphia had to pass through New 
York ; and so one proceeding from New York to Virginia 
or the Carohnas had to pass through Philadelphia; but 
the only people who needed to visit Boston were people 
bound thither. It had happened, meanwhile, that the 
regions of Eastern Massachusetts, although not literally 
the first American colonies to be settled, were probably 
the first to be politically and socially developed. Sewall's 



Some General Characteristics 191 

diary, for example, an artless record of busy life in and 
about Boston from 1674 to 1729, has few more remarkable 
traits than the fact that the surroundings and in many 
respects the society which it represents are hardly yet 
unfamiliar to people born and bred in Eastern New Eng- 
land. 

In the first place, the whole country from the Piscataqua Homo- 
to Cape Cod, and westward to the Connecticut River, eeneity. 
was almost as settled as it is to-day. Many towns of 
Sewall's time, to be sure, have been divided into smaller 
ones; but the name and the local organization of almost 
every town of his time still persist; in two hundred years 
the municipal outhnes of Massachusetts have undergone 
hardly more change than any equal space of England or 
of France. In Sewall's time, again, the population of 
this region, though somewhat different from that which at 
present exists, was much hke that which was lately famihar 
to anybody who can remember the New England country 
in i860. It was homogeneous, and so generally native 
that any inhabitants but born Yankees attracted atten- 
tion; and the separate towns were so distinct that any 
one who knew much of the country could probably 
infer from a man's name just where he came from. So 
isolated a region, with so indigenous a population, natu- 
rally developed a pretty rigid social system. 

Tradition has long supposed this system to have been 
extremely democratic, as in some superficial aspect it was. 
The popular forms of local government which were early 
established, the general maintenance of schools in every 
town at public expense, and the fact that almost any re- 
spectable trade was held a proper occupation for anybody, 
have gone far to disguise the truth that from the very set- 



Social 
Structure. 



192 The Renaissance of New England 

tlement of New England certain people there have enjoyed 
Rigid an often recognized position of social superiority. This 

Yankee aristocracy, to be sure, has never been strictly 
hereditary; with almost every generation old names have 
socially vanished and new ones appeared. Until well into 
the nineteenth century, however, two facts about New 
England society can hardly be questioned: at any given 
time there was a tacitly recognized upper class, some- 
times described by the word "equality"; and although in 
the course of time most families had their ups and downs, 
such changes were never so swift or so radical as materially 
to alter the general social structure. 

In the beginning, as Cotton Mather's old word, "the- 
ocracy," asserted, the socially and politically dominant 
class was the clergy. Until 1885, indeed, a relic of this 
fact survived in the Quinquennial Catalogues of Harvard 
College, where the names of all graduates who became 
ministers were still distinguished by italics. In the same 
catalogues the names of graduates who became governors 
or judges, or in certain other offices attained public dis- 
tinction, were printed in capital letters. These now 
trivial details indicate how the old social hierarchy of New 
England was based on education, public service, and the 
generally acknowledged importance of the ministry. When 
the mercantile class of the eighteenth century grew rich, it 
enjoyed in Boston a similar distinction, maintained by 
pretty careful observance of the social traditions which by 
that time had become immemorial. And as the grow- 
ing complexity of society in country towns developed the 
learned professions of law and medicine, the squire and 
the doctor were almost everywhere recognized as persons 
of consideration. From the beginning, meanwhile, there 



Some General Characteristics 193 

had been in New England two other kinds of people, tacitly 
felt to be of lower rank: those plain folks such as were 
originally known by the epithet " goodman," who, main- 
taining personal respectability, never rose to intellectual 
or political eminence, and never made more than enough 
money to keep decently out of debt, and those descend- 
ants of immigrant servants and the hke, whose general 
character resembled that of the poor whites of the South. 
Just as the local aristocracy of fifty years ago provided 
almost every Yankee village with its principal people, so 
this lowest class contributed to almost every village a rec- 
ognized group of village drunkards. 

The political forms which governed this isolated popu- social 
lation were outwardly democratic; the most characteristic ^^^'''^^y- 
were the town-meetings of which so much has been written. 
The population itself, too, was nowhere so large as to allow 
any resident of a given town to be a complete stranger to 
any other; but as the generations passed, the force of local 
tradition slowly, insensibly increased until, long before 
1800, the structure of New England society had become 
extremely rigid. Sewall, as we have seen, preserves an un- 
conscious picture of this society in the closing years of the 
seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. 
In more deHberate literature there are various more con- 
scious pictures of it later. To mention only a few, Mrs. 
Stowe's Oldtown Folks gives an admirably vivid account 
of the Norfolk country about 1800; Whittier's Snow- 
Bound preserves in "Flemish Pictures" the Essex County 
farmers of a few years later; and Lowell's papers on 
"Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" and on "A Great Public 
Character" — Josiah Quincy — give more stately pictures 
of Middlesex County at about the same time. The inci- 



194 The Renaissance of New England 

dental glimpses of life in Jacob Abbott's "Rollo Books" are 
artlessly true of Yankee life in the '40s; Miss Lucy Lar- 
com's New England Girlhood and Dr. Edward Everett 
Hale's more cursory New England Boyhood carry the 
story from a little earlier to a little later. Miss Alcott's 
Little Women does for the '60s what "Rollo" does for 
the '40s. And the admirable tales of Miss Mary Wilkins 
and of Miss Sarah Ornc Jewett portray the later New 
England country in its decline. In all these works, and 
in the many others of which we may take them as typical, 
you will find people of quality familiarly mingling with 
others, but tacitly recognized as socially superior, almost 
Hke an hereditary aristocracy. 
Domi- Such fixity of social structure, developed during two 

nance of ^enturies of geographical and social isolation, could not 
Clergy. ^g^p resulting in characteristic ways of thinking and feel- 
ing. There can be little doubt that the deepest traits of 
Yankee character had their origin in the intense religious 
convictions of the immigrants. The dominant class of 
pristine New England were the clergy, whose temper so 
permeated our seventeenth-century literature. Their 
creed was sternly Calvinistic; and Calvinism imposes 
upon whoever accepts it the duty of constant, terribly 
serious self-searching. The question before every indi- 
vidual who holds this faith is whether he can discern within 
himself the signs which shall prove him probably among 
the elect of God. The one certain sign of his regeneration 
may be found in spontaneous consciousness of abihty to 
use his will in accordance with that of God ; in other words, 
the elect, and no one else, can be admitted by unmerited 
divine grace into something Hke spiritual communion 
with God himself. God himself embodies absolute right 



Some General Characteristics 11)5 

and absolute truth. What the strenuously self-searching 
inner life of serious Yankees aimed to attain, accordingly, 
was immutable conviction of absolute truth. 

This it sought under the guidance of a tyrannically 
dominant priestly class. Till well after 1800, the ortho- 
dox clergy of New England maintained their formal emi- 
nence almost unbroken. In every village the settled min- 
ister, who usually held his office for life, was a man apart ; 
but he was in constant correspondence with his fellows 
elsewhere. If by any chance a New England parson 
happened to go away from home, he naturally put up at the 
minister's in every town where he passed a night. As Dr. 
Holmes once put the case, the Yankee clergy formed some- 
thing like a Brahmin caste, poor in the goods of this world, 
but autocratic in power. 

A fact about them which is often forgotten, however. Power of 

profoundly influenced New England life. Once in office, England 

they exercised tyrannical authority; but to exercise this, congrega- 
tions, 
they had to get into office and to stay there. This they 

could do only after being " called," as the phrase still goes, 
by a majority of the church members. Thus the elect of 
God, as somebody has phrased it, became the electors of 
God's chosen. From this state of things resulted a pal- 
pable check on the power of the old Yankee ministers. In 
one aspect they were autocratic tyrants; in another they 
were subject to the tyrannical power of an irresponsible 
majority vote. The kind of thing which sometimes re- 
sulted has always been familiar in America. The first 
President of Harvard College was compelled to resign his 
office because he believed in baptism by immersion; and 
Jonathan Edwards, after twenty years of service, was de- 
posed from the pulpit of Northampton at the instance of 



196 The Renaissance of New England 

a disaffected congregation. If the old New England 
clergy, in fact, felt bound to watch and guard their con- 
gregations, whose errors they denounced with all the 
solemnity of divine authority, the congregations from the 
beginning returned the compliment. They watched, they 
criticized, they denounced errors of the clergy almost as 
sharply as the clergy watched and criticized and denounced 
theirs. 

One can see why this state of things was unavoidable. 
Sincere Calvinists believed that divine grace vouchsafed 
only to the elect the power of perceiving absolute truth. 
The elect, chosen at God's arbitrary pleasure, might quite 
as probably be found among the laity as the unregenerate 
might be found among the clergy. And any mistake any- 
where in the system was no trivial matter; it literally 
meant eternal doom. So the deepest fact in the personal 
life of oldest New England, on the part of clergy and laity 
alike, was this intensely earnest, reciprocally tyrannical, 
lifelong search for absolute truth. 
Rise of Toward the period of the American Revolution the 

the Mer- mercantile prosperity of Boston had tended to develop in 
Class. the capital city of New England the kind of people famihar 

to us in the portraits of John Singleton Copley (1737- 
181 5); and their manners were becoming superficially 
like those of their contemporary England. The Boston 
gentry of the third quarter of the eighteenth century were 
a wealthier class, and in closer contact with the Old World 
than any had been before their time. In various aspects, 
the society which Copley painted was probably beginning 
to lose some characteristic native traits. If these were 
momentarily disappearing from the surface of fashionable 
New England hfe, however, they remained a little beneath 



Some General Characteristics 197 

it in all their pristine force. The literary history of the 
Revolution shows that the arguments of the Tories may 
be distinguished from those of the Revolutionists by a 
pretty sharp line. The temper of the conservative party 
which the Revolution overthrew was marked by strong 
attachment to established forms of law. The temper of 
that revolutionary party which ultimately triumphed was 
marked, despite respectful recognition of legal precedent, 
by a more instinctive liking for absolute right. In this 
revolutionary attachment to absolute right, there is some- 
thing more analogous to the unquestioning faith in abso- 
lute truth which marked the ancestral Calvinists than we 
can discern in that respect for law and order which had 
become the dominant sentiment of the Tories. How- 
ever debatable the suggestion may be, the work of the 
Revolution in New England sometimes looks like the re- 
assertion of the old native type in a society which for a little 
while had seemed to be yielding precedence to persons of 
somewhat more cosmopoHtan sympathy. 

This new generation of dominant New Englanders, 
however, many of whom were born in the country and 
came to Boston in search of fortune, was in many ways 
sounder and more characteristically native than the gen- character- 
eration which it supplanted. To speak of it as if it were ^hu^New 
a commonplace lower class which had emerged from a Generation, 
great political convulsion, would be totally to misunder- 
stand the situation. In the first place, the men of whom 
it was composed would have been recognized anywhere as 
remarkably able; in the second place, if generally de- 
scended from families for the moment less conspicuous 
than those whom Copley had painted a generation earlier, 
they were usually people who had inherited the sturdiest 



198 The Renaissance of New England 

traditions of New England manhood. Many of them could 
trace descent from the " quahty " of a century or so before; 
and at least until after the Revolution, even the lov^^er 
classes of native New England had never so far departed 
from the general native type as to resemble a European 
populace or mob. So the New England gentlemen who 
came to their best when Gilbert Stuart (i 755-1828) was 
painting were mostly people who retained, in rather more 
purity than the provincial aristocracy which for a while 
had been more fortunate, the vigorous traits of the original 
native character. Coming to prominence and fortune, 
too, with the growth of our new national life, they com- 
bined with the vigor of their untired blood a fine flush of 
independence. 

Materially this new generation declared itself in several 
obvious ways. The first was a development of foreign 
commerce, particularly with the East Indies. This brought 
our native sailors and merchants into personal contact 
with every part of the world where they could make trade 
pay. The consequent enlargement of the mental horizon 
of New England was almost incalculable. Incidentally 
this foreign trade helped develop that race of seamen 
which so asserted the naval power of the United States in 
the War of 181 2. The embargo which preceded that 
War diverted the more energetic spirit of New England 
from foreign commerce. Before long there ensued that 
development of manufactures, particularly on the Mer- 
rimac River, which remains so conspicuous a source of 
New England wealth. And at just about the time when 
these manufactures were finally established, railways at 
last brought Boston into constant and swift communica- 
tion with all parts of the New England country, — with 



Some General Characteristics 199 

Salem and Newburyport, with Fitchburg, with Worcester, 
with Providence, and with various parts of the old 
Plymouth colony. 

For almost two hundred years New England, with its 
intensely serious temper, its rigid social traditions, and its 
instinctive behef in absolute truth, had been not only an 
isolated part of the world, but had itself consisted of small 
isolated communities. Now at a moment when, at least 
relatively, its material prosperity was not only greater than 
ever before, but probably greater than it will ever be again, 
the whole region was suddenly flashed into unity. It was Unity of 
during this period that New England produced the most England, 
remarkable literary expression which has yet declared 
itself in America. To say that this resulted from social 
and economic causes is too much; what can surely be 
asserted is that the highest development of intellectual 
life in New England coincided with its greatest material 
prosperity. From the time when Benjamin Franklin left 
Boston, where Cotton Mather was still preaching, until 
the days when Unitarianism broke out there, while cotton- 
mills sprang up on the Merrimac, Boston even in America 
was hardly of the first importance. At this moment it has 
probably ceased to be so. But during the first three quar- 
ters of the nineteenth century its economic importance was 
pronounced; and intellectually it was superior to any 
other city in America. 

What happened there economically and politically, is 
not our immediate business. What does concern us is the 
intellectual outburst; and this, as we shall see, took, on 
the whole, a form which may best be described as renas- 
cent. In all sorts of intellectual life a new spirit declared 
itself; but this new spirit was more like that which aroused 



200 The Renaissance of New England 

old Italy to a fresh sense of civilized antiquity than like a 
spontaneous manifestation of native thought or feeling. 
In a few years New England developed a considerable 
political literature, of which the height was reached in 
formal oratory; it developed a new kind of scholarship, 
of which the height was reached in admirable works of 
history; in religion it developed Unitarianism ; in philos- 
ophy, Transcendentahsm; in general conduct, a tendency 
toward reform which deeply affected our national history; 
and meantime it developed the most mature school of pure 
letters which has yet appeared in this country. To these 
various phases of the New England Renaissance we m.ay 
now devote ourselves in turn. 



II 

THE NEW ENGLAND ORATORS 

References 

WEBSTER 

Works: Works, 6 vols., Boston: Little & Brown, 1851; E. P. Whip- 
ple, The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster, with an Essay 
on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style, Boston: Little, Brown & 
Co., 1879. 

Biography and Criticism: G. T. Curtis, Lije of Daniel Webster, 2 
vols., New York: Appleton, 1869-70; H. C. Lodge, Daniel Webster, Bos- 
ton: Houghton, 1S84 (as). 

Bibliography: Channing and Hart, Gwz'rfc, §§ 181-182, 191, 197. 

Selections: Carpenter, 105-118; Duyckinck, II, 32-34; Hart, Con- 
temporaries, III, No. 159; Stedman and Hutchinson, IV, 450-477. 

EVERETT 

Works: Orations and Speeches, 4 vols., Boston: I-ittle, Brown & Co., 
1853-68. 

Biography and Criticism: R. W. Emerson, "Historic Notes of Life 
and Letters in New England," (Wks., X, 307 ff.). 

Selections : Duyckinck, II, 171-173; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, 
No. 79; Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 329-339. 

CHOATE 

Works: Works, with Memoir by S. G. Brown, 2 vols., Boston: Little, 
Brown & Co., 1862. 

Biography and Criticism: S. G. Brown, Life of Rufns Choate, Boston: 
Little, Brown & Co., 187c. 

Selections: Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 495-501. 
R. c. winthrop 

Works: Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions, 4 vols., Boston: 
Little, Brown & Co., 1852-86. 

Biography and Criticism: R. C. Winthrop, Jr., Memoir, Boston: 
Little, Brown & Co., 1897. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 501-503; *Stcdman and Hutchinson, VI, 
420-429. 

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Hterary ex- 
pression of New England had been chiefly theological; 



202 The Renaissance of New England 

in the eighteenth century this expression, at least in the 
region of Boston, became chiefly pohtical. In each 
case the dominant phase of New England expression had 
been decidedly serious, and had been concerned with one of 
the ideals most deeply associated with our ancestral lan- 
guage. These ideals we have broadly called those of the 
Bible and of the Common Law; the former incessantly 
reminds us that we must do right, the latter that we must 
maintain our rights. And they have in common another 
trait than cither their deep association with the temper 
of English-speaking races or their pervasive seriousness; 
both are best set forth by means of public speaking. 
Sermons. From the very beginning the appetite for public dis- 
course in New England had been correspondingly keen. 
In the seventeenth century a minister who preached or 
prayed well was sure of admiration and popularity ; in the 
eighteenth century a similar popularity was the certain 
reward of a lawyer, too, who displayed oratorical power; 
and until long after 1800 native Yankees had a tradi- 
tional liking, which they honestly believed unaffected, for 
hearing people talk from platforms or pulpits. 
Oratory of When the Revolution came, accordingly, the surest 
iuhon.*^°' means of attaining eminence in New England was pubHc 
speaking. James Otis, always a man rather of speech 
than of action, began the career which made his name 
national by his spoken argument against Writs of Assist- 
ance. The heroic memory of Joseph Warren is almost 
as closely associated with his oration at the Old South 
Church concerning the Boston Massacre as with his death 
at Bunker Hill. Samuel Adams, too, is remembered as 
eloquent; and John Adams was a skilful public speaker. 
There is something widely characteristic, indeed, in the 



The Nexv England Orators 203 

speech which Webster's eulogy of 1826 attributed to this 
first New England President of the United States. The 
famous "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish," 
closely imitates the harangues and speeches of classical 
historians. In each case the speeches may possibly have 
been based on some tradition of what was actually said; 
in each case, obeying the conventional fashion of his time, 
the writer^Thucydides, Livy, or Webster — puts into the 
mouth of a hero eloquent words which are really his own. 
In each case these words not only characterize the per- 
sonages who are feigned to have uttered them, but as 
elaborately artificial pieces of rhetoric they throw light as 
well both on the men who composed them and on the pub- 
lic for which they were composed. In more than one way, 
we can see the speech which Webster's superb fiction of 
1826 attributed to the John Adams of half a century be- 
fore illustrates the New England oratory of which Adams 
was one of the first exponents and Webster himself the 
greatest. 

For between Adams's early maturity and Webster's 
prime there was a flood of public speaking in New Eng- 
land, more and more punctilious and finished in form. 
Were oratory pure literature, indeed, and not rather re- 
lated to the functions of the pulpit or the bar, we should 
have to linger over the American oratory of the century 
which followed the Revolution. In a study like ours, how- 
ever, we need only glance at it; and this hasty glance 
shows clearly that its most eminent exponent in New 
England was Daniel Webster (i 782-1852). 

Webster's pubhc hfe is a matter of familiar history. Webster. 
The son of a New Hampshire farmer, he graduated at 
Dartmouth College. He began his legal career in his na- 



204 The Renaissance of New England 



tive State; but before 1820 removed to Boston. Webster's 
active life in Massachusetts coincided with the full de- 
velopment of those manufacturing industries at the head 
of which were some of the most substantial members of 
the old Whig party, which for a good while controlled 
Massachusetts politics. Of this party Webster soon 
became the recognized leader, acquiring such power as no 
_ other political leader of New 

England has known before or 
since. 

As an advocate at the bar, as a 
representative of public senti- 
ment on memorable festal occa- 
sions, and finally as the most 
influential of American Senators, 
Webster's means of asserting 
himself remained the same. He 
had an unsurpassed power of get- 

2it^^^ /^ c^^y{^ *^"S ^P ^^^^'"^ S^^^^ ho^\^?> of his 
fellow -citizens and talking to 
them in a way which should hold their attention, influ- 
ence their convictions, and guide their conduct. 

Webster's most famous occasional speeches are those 
at the Pilgrim anniversary (1820), at the laying of the 
corner stone of Bunker Hill Monument (1825), and on 
Adams and Jefferson (1826); his most noted legal argu- 
ments are on the Dartmouth College case (181 7) and on 
the White Murder case (1830) ; his greatest political speech 
is his " Reply to Hayne" (1830). As one reads in chrono- 
logic order these great speeches and the others in the six 
volumes of Webster's collected works, one finds a gain in 
solidity, simplicity, and eloquence. These qualities 




The New England Orators 205 

combined with Webster's immense physical impressive- 
ness and his wonderful voice to make him the greatest of 
American orators. 

It is true, however, that Webster occasionally lapsed 
into bulky commonplace, and that even his greatest efforts 
have about them an air of elaborate artificiahty, though 
his artificiality almost always has a ring of genuineness. 
Webster wrote and spoke in a way which to him, as well 
as to the pubUc of his time, seemed the only fit one for 
matters of such dignity as those with which he had to deal; 
and he wrote and spoke with a fervid power which any 
one can recognize. All the same, his style is certainly more 
analogous to Dr. Johnson's published prose than to those 
idiomatic utterances recorded by Boswell which have 
made Johnson immortal. If Webster's power is beyond 
dispute, so is his tendency to pose. This tendency he 
enforced, in a manner which was thoroughly acceptable to 
the America of his time, by an extremely elaborate rhetoric 
based partly on the parliamentary traditions of eighteenth 
century England, and partly, hke those traditions them- 
selves, on the classical oratory of Rome and Greece. 

Such highly developed oratory as Webster's never grows 
into existence alone. Webster was only the most eminent 
member of a school which has left many other memories, 
in their own day of almost equal distinction; and as a 
typical New Hampshire man, indeed he was rather less 
representative of the Boston orators of his time than were 
some natives of Massachusetts. 

Of these none was more distinguished than Edward Everett. 
Everett (i 794-1865). The son of a minister, whose 
father was a farmer, he took his degree at Harvard in 
181 1, and two years later he became for a while minister 



20G The Renaissance of New England 



His Career 
based on 
Mastery of 
Rhetoric. 



of the Brattle Street Church in Boston. A year or so later, 
having been appointed professor of Greek at Harvard, he 
went abroad to prepare himself for his academic duties, 
and was among the earliest of American scholars to study 
at a German university. On his return from Europe he 
"exhibited," says Emerson,* " all the richness of a rhet- 
oric which we have never seen ri- 
valled in this country." 

That Everett was no mere rhet- 
orician, however, the facts of his 
career instantly show. Besides be- 
ing preacher and college professor, 
he was an editor of the North A mer- 
ican Review; for ten years he was 
a member of Congress; for four 
years he was governor of Massa- 
^ chusetts; for four more he was 

(^''d^^-''^-^ (zi.>-.c.^^^ Minister to England; he succeeded 
Webster as Secretary of State; he 
was president of Harvard College; he was senator from 
Massachusetts; and in i860 he was nominated for, the 
vice-presidency of the United States by the party which 
bravely tried to avert secession. In person he embodied 
that dignified grace which marked the Whig gentlemen of 
Massachusetts; and if his sensitiveness of feeling and his 
formality of manner prevented him at once from popular- 
ity and from unrestrained fervor of utterance, no man of 
his time has been remembered with more admiration or 
respect. And this whole brilliant and useful career was 
based on consummate mastery of rhetoric. 

* "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England" in Emerson's 
Works, Riverside edition, vol. x, pp. 307 ff. The sentence quoted is on 
P- 314- 




Tlie Nezc England Orators 207 

Everett's published works consist of four volumes, en- 
titled Orations and Speeches, beginning with an address 
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College on 
"The Circumstances Favorable to the Progress of Litera- 
ture in America," dehvered in 1824, and closing with a 
brief address at Faneuil Hall in aid of a "Subscription to 
Relieve the Suffering People of Savannah," delivered on 
the 9th of January, 1865, less than a week before his death. 
Throughout these four volumes, comprising the utter- 
ances of more than forty years, every paragraph seems a 
s-tudied work of art. Everett's natural feeling was warm 
and spontaneous; but he had acquired and he unswerv- 
ingly maintained that incessant self-control which his gen- 
eration held among the highest ideals of conduct. So 
whatever he pubhcly uttered, and still more whatever he 
suffered himself to print, was deliberately considered to 
the minutest detail. 

The eloquence and the rhetorical skill of Webster and 
of Everett were the more admired in their own day for the 
reason that they were exercised in behalf of those political 
principles which then commanded the support of all con- 
servative people in Massachusetts. So too was the elo- 
quence of many other men, each of whom may fairly be 
held a master of the art of which Everett and Webster were 
the most eminent exponents. Even so cursory a study as 
ours may not neglect the name of Rufus Choate (1799- choate. 
1859), hke Webster a graduate of Dartmouth, Hke Everett 
a lifelong reader of the classics, and for years not only 
eminent in public life, but acknowledged to be the most 
powerful advocate at the New England bar. A little later 
than the prime of these men there arose in Boston another 
generation of orators, differing from their predecessors 



208 The Renaissance of New England 

both in principle and to some degree in method, who used 
their great powers for purposes which impressed conser- 
vative people as demagogic. Of these the most eminent 
were Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Charles 
Sumner. On all three we shall touch later. But we may 
hardly again have occasion to mention an eminent citizen 
of the elder type who preserved to the end the traditions 
of that great school of formal oratory of which he was the 

winthrop. last survivor, — Robert Charles Winthrop (i 809-1 894). 
With Winthrop, one may say, the oratory of New Eng- 
land expired. And now, as one considers its century and 
more of history, one discerns more and more clearly why 
the period in which it reached its height may best be un- 

Summary. dcrstood whcu wc Call it a period of Renaissance. Almost 
from the time of the Revolution, isolated New England, 
like the rest of America, was awakening to a new sense 
of national consciousness ; so the society of New England, 
traditionally one which venerated its leaders, looked to 
the men whom circumstances brought prominently for- 
ward for indubitable assertion of dignity in our national 
character. The professional circumstances which brought 
men forward were generally those of the pulpit or the bar; 
clergymen and lawyers accordingly fou.nd that they could 
no longer maintain their eminence by merely treading in 
the footsteps of their predecessors. Trained in our old 
Yankee colleges at a time when such education meant a 
little mathematics and a tolerable reading knowledge of 
the classics, these men, who felt themselves called upon 
to express our new nationality, turned by instinct to that 
mode of expression which in crude form had long been 
characteristic of their country. In their impulsive desire 
to give this a new vitality, they instinctively began to emu- 



Tlie New England Orators 209 

late first the formal oratory of England, which had reached 
its height in the preceding century; and then, perhaps 
more consciously, they strove to saturate themselves with 
the spirit of those masterpieces of oratory which help to 
immortahze the inimitable Hteratures of Rome and of 
Greece. 

On general principles, the world might have expected 
America to produce public utterances of a crudely passion- 
ate kind, marked rather by difference from what had gone 
before than by respect for traditional models. Instead, 
without a touch of affectation, our orators, obeying the 
genuine impulse of their nature, exerted their most strenu- 
ous energy in persistent efforts to emulate the achieve- 
ments of an extremely elaborate art which had attained 
final excellence in the days of Cicero and Demosthenes. 
The oratorical models of Greece and of Rome they imi- 
tated in just such spirit as that in which the masterpieces 
of antique plastic art were imitated by fifteenth-century 
Italy. Apart from its political significance, as embodying 
principles which controlled the American history of their 
time, their work is significant in our study as proving how 
spontaneously the awakening national consciousness of 
New England strove to prove our country civilized by 
conscientious obedience to eldest civilized tradition. 



Ill 

THE NEW ENGLAND SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 

References 

General References: Justin Winsor, "Libraries in Boston," Me- 
morial History of Boston, IV, 235 ff; A. B. Hart, "The American School 
of Historians, " International Monthly, Vol. II, No. 3 (September, 1900); 
J. F. Jameson, The History oj Historical Writing in America, Boston: 
Houghton, i8qi. 

SPARKS 

Works : No collected edition of Sparks's writings. The chief titles are : 
Library 0} American Biography, first series, 10 vols., Boston: Hilliard, 
Gray & Co., 1834-38; second series, 15 vols., Boston: Little & Brown, 
1844-48; Washington's Writings, 12 vols., Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 
1834-37; Franklin's Worhs, 10 vols., Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1836- 
40; Correspondence oj the American Revolution, 4 vols., Boston: Little, 
Brown & Co., 1853; The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American 
Revolution, 12 vols., Boston: N. Hale and Gray iSi Bowen, 1829-30. 

Biography, Criticism, and Bibliography: H. B. Adams, The Life 
and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1893. 

Selections: Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 191-196. 



Works: History oj Spanish Literature, 3 vols.. New York: Harper, 
1849; Lije oj William Hickling Prescott, Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864. 
There is no uniform edition of Ticknor's works. 

Biography and Criticism: The Lije, Letters, and Journals oj George 
Ticknor, 2 vols., Boston: Osgood, 1876. (Prepared by G. S. Hillard, with 
Mrs. and Miss Ticknor.) 

Bibliography: Foley, 293-294. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 232-235; Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 

240-248. 

prescott 

Works: Works, ed. J. F. Kirk, 12 vols., Philadelphia: Lippincott, 
1890-92. 

210 



New England Scholars 211 

Biography and Criticism: George Ticknor, Life oj William Hick- 
ling PrescoU, Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864; RoUo Ogden, William 
Hickling PrescoU, Boston: Houghton, 1904 (aml). 

Bibliography: Foley, 232-233. 

Selections: *Carpenter, 175-186; Duyckinck, II, 237-242; *Stedman 
and Hutchinson, V, 399-428. 

MOTLEY 

Works: Historical Works, 17 vols.. New York: Harper, 1900; Letters, 
ed. G. W. Curtis, 2 vols.. New York: Harper, 1889. 

Biography and Criticism: Memoir by O. W. Flolmes, Boston: 
Houghton, 1878. 

Bibliogr.\phy: Foley, 203-204. 

Selections: Carpenter, 326-337; Stedman and Hutchinson, \'II, 253- 
268. 

parkman 

Works: Works, 12 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1900-01. 

Biography and Criticism: *C. H. Farnham, A Life 0} Francis Park- 
man, Boston: I^ittle, Brown & Co., 1900; John Fiske, "Francis Park- 
man" {A Century of Science and Other Essays), Boston: Houghton, 1900, 
pp. 194-264; H. D. Sedgwick, Francis Parkman, Boston: Houghton, 
1904 (aml). 

Bibliogr.\phy: Foley, 217-218. 

Selections: Carpenter, 437-450; Stedman and Hutchinson, VIII, 
95-110. 

The high development of mental activity indicated by 

the renascent oratory of New England was not solitary: 
something similar appeared at the same period in the 
professional scholarship of the region. From the begin- 
ning, the centre of learning there had been Harvard Col- 
lege, founded to perpetuate a learned ministry. This it 
did throughout its seventeenth-century career; and in the 
eighteenth century it also had the distinction of educating 
many lawyers and statesmen who became eminent at the 
time of the Revolution. Up to the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century, however, Harvard College remained little 
more than a boys' school. It received pupils very young; 



212 The Benaissance of New England 

it gave them a fair training in Latin and Greek, a little 
mathematics, and a touch of theology if they so inclined; 
and then it sent them forth to the careers of mature life. 
It contented itself, in brief, with preserving the tradition 
of academic training planted in the days of Charles I; 
and this it held, in rather mediaeval spirit, to be chiefly 
valuable as the handmaiden of theology, and later of 
law. One principal function of a true university — that of 
acquiring and publishing fresh knowledge — it had not 
attempted. 

In the surrounding air, however, a new and fresh spirit 
of learning declared itself, and the leaders of this, as well 
as the followers, were generally either Harvard men or 
men who in mature life were closely allied with our oldest 
Growth of college. The celebrated Count Rumford, for one, a 
and of Yankee country boy, began his regular study of science 
by attending the lectures of Professor John Winthrop of 
Harvard, before the Revolution; and in spite of his per- 
manent departure from his native country, he retained a 
keen interest in New England. In 1780 he had some- 
thing to do with the founding in Boston of the American 
Academy of Arts and Sciences, which, with the exception of 
Franklin's Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, is the 
oldest learned society in America. For more than a 
century the American Academy has maintained, in its 
proceedings and its publications, a standard of learning 
recognized all over the world as excellent. Nor was it 
long alone. In 1791, the Massachusetts Historical So- 
ciety was founded for the purpose of collecting, preserving, 
and publishing historical matter, chiefly relating to its 
ancestral Commonwealth. Like the American Academy 
this society still flourishes, and during its century of ex- 



Learned 
Societies. 



Netc England Scholars 213 

istence it has published a considerable amount of material, 
admirably set forth and often of more than local impor- 
tance. 

In the early years of the nineteenth century, too, certain 
young gentlemen of Boston, mostly graduates of Harvard 
and chiefly members of the learned professions, formed 
themselves into an Anthology Club, with the intention of 
conducting a literary and scholarly review. Their An- Reviews, 
thology did not last long; but their Club developed on the 
one hand into the Boston Athenaeum, and in 1815, on the 
other hand, into that periodical which long remained 
the serious vehicle of scholarly New England thought, — 
the North American Review. This was modelled on the 
great British Reviews, — the "Edinburgh" and the "Quar- 
terly"; and under the guidance of such men as William 
Tudor, Edward Tyrrell Channing, Jared Sparks, James 
Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and Dr. Andrew 
Preston Peabody, it maintained its dignity for more than 
fifty years. 

Though the American Academy, the Massachusetts 
Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, and the old 
North American Review may hardly be taken as com- 
prehensive of the new learning which was springing into 
life among Boston men bred at Harvard, they are especially 
typical of it, in the fact that none of them was indige- 
nous; all alike were successful efforts to imitate in our 
independent New England certain learned institutions 
of Europe. What they stand for — the real motive which 
was in the air — was an awakening of American conscious- 
ness to the fact that serious contemporary standards 
existed in other countries than our own, and that our claim 
to respect as a civilized community could no longer be 



214 The Renaissance of New England 

maintained by the mere preservation of a respectable 
classical school for boys. Our first outbreak of the spirit 
of learning, indeed, was even more imitative than the 
contemporary literature w^hich sprang up in New York, 
or than the oratory which in the same years so elaborately 
developed itself in Massachusetts. 

It was not until a little later that the scholarly impulses 
of New England produced either persons or works of 
literary distinction; but the form which the characteristic 
literature of this scholarship was to take had already been 
indicated both by the early literary activities of this part 
of the country and by the nature of its most distin- 
guished learned society. From the earliest period of 
Massachusetts, as we have seen, there was, along with 
theological writing, a considerable body of publications 
which may be roughly classified as historical. The Mag- 
nalia of Cotton Mather, for instance, the most typical 
literary production of seventeenth-century America, was 
almost as historical in impulse as it was theological. Earlier 
still, the most permanent literary monument of the Plym- 
outh colony was Bradford's manuscript history; and such 
other manuscripts as Winthrop's history and Sewall's diary 
show how deeply rooted in the colony of Massachusetts 
too was our lasting fondness for historical record. Other 
than local history, indeed, seems to have interested the 
elder Yankees chiefly as it bore on the origins and develop- 
ment of New England. An extreme example of this fact 
is to be found in the Chronological History 0} New Eng- 
land in the Form 0} Annals, the first volume of which was 
published in 1736,* by the Reverend Thomas Prince 

* In 1755 appeared the two pamphlet numbers which make up the 
second volume. 



New England Scholars 215 

(1687-1758), minister of the Old South Church. Prince 
had unrivalled opportunities for collecting and preserving 
the facts of our first century; but, having thought proper 
to begin his work by "an introduction, containing a brief Prince; 
Epitome of the most remarkable Transactions and Events ^^^'^^^ 
ABROAD, from the CREATION," he had the misfortune 
to die before he had brought the chronology of New Eng- 
land itself to a later period than 1630. A more philosoph- 
ical work than Prince's was that History 0} Massachusetts* 
by Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780), which may perhaps 
be called the most respectable American book before the 
Revolution. From the foundation of the colony, in short, 
New England men had always felt strong interest in local 
affairs and traditions; and this had resulted in a general 
habit of collecting and sometimes of publishing accounts 
of what had happened in their native regions. 

The temper in question is still famihar to any one who 
knows w^hat pleasure native Yankees are apt to take in 
genealogical research. Throughout the nineteenth cen- 
tury it has borne fruit in those innumerable town histories 
which make the local records of New England so minutely 
accessible to all who have patience to plod through volumes 
of trivial detail. It may fairly be regarded as the basis 
in New England character of the most scholarly literature 
which New England has produced. For during the 
nineteenth century there appeared in Boston a group of 
historians whose work became widely and justly celebrated. 

The first of these, although he made a deeper impression 
on the intellectual life of Boston than almost anybody else, 
is hardly remembered as of high literary importance. 
This was George Ticknor (1791-1871), the only son of 

* Vol. I, 1764; vol. II, 1767; vol. Ill, 1828. 



216 The Renaissance of New England 



Ticknor. a prospcrous Boston merchant. He was sent to Dartmouth 
College and after graduation prepared himself for the 
practice of law; but finding this uncongenial, and having 
in prospect fortune enough to maintain himself without a 
profession, he determined to devote himself to pure schol- 
arship. In 1 815 he accordingly went abroad and studied 

at the University of Gottingen, 
where Edward Everett came in 
the same year. These two were 
among the first of that distin- 
guished and continuous line of 
American scholars who have 
supplemented their native edu- 
cation by enthusiastic devotion 
to German learning. In 1819, 
having returned to America, 
Ticknor became the first Smith 
Professor of the French and 
Spanish Languages and Belles 
^-e.-^^-. ^y<i^^<sr~\ Lettres at Harvard College; 
Everett at the same time be- 
gan his lectures there as professor of Greek. Together 
they stood for the new principle that instructors ought 
not only to assure themselves that students have learned, 
but actually to teach. Everett relinquished his profes- 
sorship in 1824, betaking himself to that more public 
career which is better remembered. Ticknor, the first 
Harvard professor of modern languages, retained his 
chair until 1835; and during this time he strenuously 
attempted to enlarge the office of Harvard from that of a 
respectable high school to that of a true university. 

Besides this service to professional learning, Ticknor, 




New England Scholars 217 

in later life, had more than any one else to do with the 
establishment of the Boston Public Library. Ticknor's 
private library was in its day among the largest and best 
selected on this side of the Atlantic; and his enthusiasm 
in the cause of learning induced him to lend his books freely 
to any respectable persons who satisfied him that they 
really wanted to use them. The result convinced him that 
if he could bring the American pubhc into free contact 
with good literature, the general taste for good reading 
would increase, and the general intelligence and con- 
sequent civilization would improve, in accordance with the 
aspirations of human nature toward what is best. Thus 
the idea of a great public library grew in his mind ; and in 
1852 he was an eager leader in the movement which estab- 
lished in Boston the first and best public circulating library 
of America. 

As the first learned professor of modern languages in an 
American university, as the first exponent in our university 
life of continental scholarship, as the earliest of Americans 
to attempt the development of an American college into a 
modern university, and finally as the chief founder of the 
chief public library in the United States, Ticknor's claims 
upon popular memory are remarkable. Ticknor himself, 
however, would probably have regarded as his principal 
claim to recognition the History of Spanish Literature History of 
(1849). From the time of his first journey abroad he had 
been attracted to Spanish matters; his professorship at 
Harvard, too, was partly devoted to Spanish literature; 
and incidentally he collected a Spanish library said to be 
the most important outside of Spain itself. It was not until 
thirty years after he began the work of the Smith profes- 
sorship that he published his history. For years this book. 



Spanish 
Literature. 



218 The Renaissance of New England 

which involved untiring investigation of the best German 
type, remained authoritative and did much to estabhsh 
throughout the learned world the position of American 
scholarship. On the other hand, it is not interesting. 
Ticknor's mind was rather acquisitive and retentive than 
creative. His work is that of a thoroughly trained scholar; 
of a man, too, so sincerely devoted to literature that, as we 
have seen, his services to literary culture in America can 
hardly be overestimated; of a man, furthermore, whose 
letters and journals show him, though deficient in humor, 
to have had at command an agreeable and fluent every-day 
style. When all is said, however, the History of Spanish 
Literature is heavily respectable reading. A more winning 
example of Ticknor's literary power is the life of his friend 
and contemporary, Prescott, which he published in 1864, 
five years after Prescott 's death. 

About the time when Ticknor began his teaching in the 
Smith professorship at Harvard, a subsequently famous 
declaration of the Unitarian faith was made in the sermon 
preached at Baltimore by William Ellery Channing, on 
the occasion of the ordination to the Unitarian ministry 
of a man no longer in his first youth, Jared Sparks (1789- 
1866). Sparks's ministerial career was not very long. 
In 1824 he became an editor of the North American 
Review, and for the rest of his life he remained in New 
England. From 1839 to 1849 he was professor of history 
at Harvard; from 1849 to 1853 he was President of the 
College ; and after his resignation he continued resident in 
Cambridge until his death. 

Sparks left behind him no original writings which have 
survived; but his special services to historical study in New 
England were almost as great as were those of Ticknor 



New England Scholars 219 

to the study of modern languages and to the modern spirit 
in learning. In 1829 he began to issue The Diplomatic 
Correspondence 0} the American Revolution in twelve vol- 
umes. Between 1834 and 1840 he collected and issued the 
first authoritative editions of the writings of Washington 
and of Franklin. In these works, although he permitted 
himself to correct the spelling and grammar of documents, 
he showed himself to be scrupulously exact in statements 
of fact and untiring in methodical accumulation of material. 
In 1834 appeared the first volume of his Library of Ameri- 
can Biography, the publication of which continued until 
1848, In each of the twenty-five volumes are the hves of 
three or four eminent Americans, generally written by 
enthusiastic young scholars, but all subjected to the edi- 
torial supervision of Sparks, who thus brought into being 
a still valuable biographical dictionary. 

Such work as this clearly evinces wide and enthusiastic 
interest in the study and writing of history. Though not 
educated in Germany, Sparks, with his untiring energy 
in the accumulation and arrangement of material, and his 
unusual power of making other people work systematically, 
was very like a sound German scholar. He really estab- 
lished a large historical factory; with skilled help, he col- 
lected all the raw material he could find; and he turned 
out something like a finished article in lengths to suit, — 
somewhat as his commercial contemporaries spun ex- 
cellent cotton. In a mechanical way his work was ad- 
mirable; he really advanced New England scholarship. 

If neither Ticknor nor Sparks contributed to permanent Prescott. 
literature, the names of both are closely connected with 
that of the first man in New England who wrote history in 
a spirit as literary as that of Gibbon or Macaulay. This 



220 The Renaissance of New England 

is the personal friend whose biography by Ticknor is the 
most sympathetic work which Ticknor has left us — 
William Hickling Prescott (i 796-1859). In the first 
volume of Sparks's Library of American Biography, pub- 
lished in 1834, is Prescott's "Life of Charles Brockden 
Brown," written in the somewhat florid style then fash- 
ionable. At the time when this was published, Prescott 
was known as a gentleman of scholarly temper and com- 
fortable fortune, approaching the age of forty, whose life 
had probably been ruined by an accident at college. The 
students of his day had been boisterous in table manners; 
and on one occasion somebody thoughtlessly threw a piece 
of bread across the dining-room, striking Prescott in the 
eye. This resulted in so serious an injury that he could 
never read again, and that he could write only with the aid 
of a machine composed of parallel wires by means of which 
he painfully guided his pencil. 
Ferdinand In spitc of tlicsc obstaclcs he quictly set to work on his 
Ferdinand and Isabella. As the book approached com- 
pletion, he was beset with doubts of its merit. Unable 
to use his eyes, he had been compelled to collect his ma- 
terial through the aid of readers, and then to compose it 
in his head before he felt prepared to dictate it; and he 
was so far from satisfied with the result of his labors that he 
hesitated about publication. An anecdote which Ticknor 
relates of this moment is characteristic of the man and of 
his time. "He consulted with his father, as he always did 
when he doubted in relation to matters of consequence. 
His father not only advised the publication, but told him 
that ' the man who writes a book which he is afraid to pub- 
lish is a coward.'" So in 1838 The History of the Reign 
of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic was published; and 



and 
Isabella. 



New Ens-land Scholars 



221 



at last New England had produced a ripe historian. The 
Conquest 0} Mexico followed in 1843, the Conquest of Peru 
in 1847, and Prescott was still engaged on his Lije oj 
Philip II when, in 1859, he died of apoplexy. 

Since Prescott's time, the tendency has been more and 
more to regard history as a matter rather of science than 
literature; the fashion of style, too, has greatly changed 
from that which prevailed when 
New England found the model of 
rhetorical excellence in its formal 
oratory. Accordingly, Prescott's 
work is often mentioned as rather 
romantic than scholarly. In this 
view there is some justice. The 
scholarship of his day had not col- 
lected anything like the material 
now at the disposal of students; 
and Prescott's infirmity of sight 
could not help further limiting the 
range of his investigation. His 
style, too, always clear and readable, and often vivid, is style, 
somewhat florid and generally colored by what seems a 
conviction that historical writers should maintain the dig- 
nity of history. For all this, his works so admirably com- 
bine substantial truth with literary spirit that they are 
more useful than many which are respected as more 
authoritative. What he tells us is the result of thoughtful 
study; and he tells it in a manner so clear, and so urbane, 
that when you have read one of his chapters you remem- 
ber without effort what it is about. With a spirit as modern 
as Ticknor's, and with much of the systematic scholarship 
of Sparks, Prescott combined unusual literary power. 




222 The Renaissance of New England 

For our purposes, however, the most notable phase of 
his work is to be found in the subjects to which he turned. 
At first his aspirations to historical writing took a general 
form. At last, after hesitation as to what he should write 
about,* he was most attracted by the same romantic Spain 
which a few years before had captivated Irving. Sitting 
blind in his New England of the early Renaissance, whose 
outward aspect was so staidly decorous, he found his 
imagination stirred by those phases of modern history 
which were most splendidly unlike his ancestral inexperi- 

Renascent cnce. He chosc first that climax of Spanish history when 
^' in the same year, 1492, native Spaniards triumphantly 
closed their eight hundred years of conflict against the 
Moorish invaders, and the voyage of Columbus opened to 
Spain those new empires of which for a while our own New 
England had seemed likely to be a part. Then he found 
deeply stirring the fatal conflict between Spanish invaders 
and the civihzations of prehistoric America. Finally, hav- 
ing written of Spanish power at its zenith, he began to 
record the tale of its stormy sunset in the reign of Philip 
II. So the impulse of this first of our standard historians 
seems very like that of Irving. Irving and Prescott ahke, 
living far from all traces of antique splendor, found their 
strongest stimulus in the most brilliant pageant of the 
romantic European past. 

Bancroft. There were New England historians, to be sure, who 
wrote about our own country. The most eminent of these 
was George Bancroft (1800-1891), who graduated at 
Harvard, and hke Ticknor and Everett was a student in 

* See his Lije by Ticknor, pp. 70-76. The decision was much influ- 
enced by Prescott's hearing Ticknor read aloud his lectures on Spanish 
literature. 



New England Scholars 223 

Germany. Afterwards he was for a while a tutor at Har- 
vard, and later a master of the celebrated Round Hill school 
in Western Massachusetts. Not long afterwards he be- 
came a public man; he was Collector of the Port of Boston, 
he was Secretary of the Navy under President Polk, and 
subsequently he was Minister both to England and to Ger- 
many. He left New England at about the age of forty 
and afterwards resided chiefly in Washington. In 1834, 
the year in which Prescott's "Life of Brockden Brown" 
was pubhshed, appeared, too, the first volume of Ban- 
croft's History 0} the United States, a work on which he 
was steadily engaged for fifty-one years, and which he left 
unfinished. The dominant politics of New England had 
been Federalist; Bancroft's history sympathized with the 
Democratic party. In consequence, sharp fault was 
found with him, and he was never on cordial terms with 
the other New England historians; but he persevered in 
writing history all his life, and, for all the diffuse floridity 
of his style, he is still an authority. Partly to correct Ban- 
croft, Richard Hildreth (i 807-1 865) wrote a History Hiidreth; 
of the United States (1851-1856) from the Federalist point P*""y- 
of view; and Dr. John Gorham Palfrey (i 796-1881) 
was for years engaged on his minute but lifeless History 
of New England (i 858-1 890). In these, however, and 
in the other historians who were writing of our own coun- 
try, there was less imaginative vigor and far less literary 
power than in Prescott or in the two younger New Eng- 
land historians whose works are indubitably literature. 

The first of these younger men was John Lothrop Motley. 
Motley (1814-1877). He graduated at Harvard; he 
studied for a while in Germany, where he began in youth 
a hfelong friendship with his fellow-student Count Bis- 



22-t The Renaissance of New England 

marck; and toward the end of his Hfe he Hved mostly in 
Europe. At one time he was Minister to Austria, and 
later to England. As early as 1839 he wrote Morion's 
Hope, a novel, which deserved its lack of success. A 
little later he anonymously wrote for the North American 
Review an article on Peter the Great which attracted much 
favorable attention; but it was not until 1856 that he pub- 
lished his first permanent work, The Rise 0} the Dutch 
Republic. This was followed, between 1861 and 1868, 
by his History oj the United Netherlands, and finally in 
1874 by his John oj Barneveld. 

Motley's historical work is obviously influenced by the 
vividly picturesque writings of Carlyle. It is clearly in- 
fluenced, too, by intense sympathy with that liberal spirit 
which he believed to characterize the people of the Nether- 
Temper lands during their prolonged conflict with Spain. From 
these traits result several obvious faults. In trying to be 
vivid, he becomes artificial. In the matter of character, 
too, his Spaniards are apt to be intensely black, and his 
Netherlanders ripe for heaven. Yet, for all this partisan 
temper. Motley was so industrious in accumulating ma- 
terial, so untiring in his effort vividly to picture historic 
events, and so heartily in sympathy with his work, that he 
is almost always interesting. What most deeply stirred 
him was his belief in the abstract right of man to political 
liberty; and this he wished to celebrate with epic spirit. 
BeHef and spirit alike were characteristically American; 
in the history of his own country there was abundant 
evidence of both. The assertion of liberty which finally 
stirred his imagination to the point of expression, however, 
was not that of his American forefathers, but the earlier 
one, more brilliantly picturesque, and above all more 



and Style. 



New England Scholars 225 

remote, which had marked the history of a foreign race in 
Europe. Even as late as Motley's time, in short, the 
historical imagination of New England was apt to seek 
its material abroad. 

The latest and most mature of our New England his- Parkman. 
torians was more national. Francis Parkman (1823- 
1893), the son of a Unitarian minister, was born at Boston. 
He graduated at Harvard in 1844. By that time his health 
had already shown signs of infirmity; and this was so 
aggravated by imprudent physical exposure during a jour- 
ney* across the continent shortly after graduation that he 
was a lifelong invalid. Threatened for a full half- century 
with ruinous malady of both brain and body, he persisted, 
by sheer force of will, with literary plans which he had 
formed almost in boyhood. His imagination was first 
kindled by the forests of our ancestral continent. These 
excited his interest in the native races of America; and 
this, in turn, obviously brought him to the frequent alli- 
ances between the French and the Indians during the 
first two centuries of our x'Vmerican history. His lifelong 
work finally resulted in those volumesf which record from 
beginning to end the struggles for the possession of North 
America between the French, with their Indian allies, 
and that English-speaking race whose final victory deter- 
mined the course of our national history. 

Parkman 's works really possess great philosophic in- 

* Recorded in The California and Oregon Trail, 1849. 

'\ The History of the Conspiracy 0} Pontiac, 1851; The Pioneers 0} 
France in the New World, 1865; The Jesuits in North America in 
the Seventeenth Century, 1867; The Discovery of the Great West, 1869; 
The Old Regime in Canada, 1874; Count Frontenac and New France 
under Louis XIV, 1877; Montcalm and Wolfe, 1884; A Half-Century 
of Conflict, 1892. 



226 The Renaissance of New England 



Summary. 



terest. With full sympathy for both sides, with untiring 
industry in the accumulation of material, with good sense 
so judicial as to forbid him the vagaries of preconception, 
and with a hterary sensitiveness which made his later 
style a model of sound prose, he set forth the struggles 
which decided the political future of America. Moved 
to this task by an impulse rather romantic than scien- 
tific, to be sure, gifted with a sin- 
gularly vivid imagination, too 
careful a scholar to risk undue 
generalization, and throughout 
life so hampered by illness that 
he could very rarely permit him- 
self prolonged mental e IT o r t , 
Parkman sometimes appeared 
chiefly a writer of romantic nar- 
rative. As you grow familiar 
with his work, however, you feel 
it so true that you can infuse it 
with philosophy for yourself. It 
is hardly too much to say that his writings afford as 
sound a basis for historical philosophizing as does great 
fiction for philosophizing about human nature. 

Parkman brings the story of renascent scholarship in 
New England almost to our own day. When the nine- 
teenth century began, our scholarship was merely a tra- 
ditional memory of classical learning, generally treated as 
the handmaiden either of professional theology or of pro- 
fessional law. When the spirit of a new life began to 
declare itself here, and people grew aware of contemporary 
foreign achievement, there came first a little group of men 
who studied in Europe and brought home the full spirit 




New England Scholars 227 

of that continental scholarship which during the present 
century has so dominated learning in America. As this 
spirit began to express itself in literary form, it united with 
our ancestral fondness for historic records to produce, ' 
just after the moment when formal oratory most flourished 
here, an eminent school of historical literature. Most of 
this history, however, deals with foreign subjects. The 
historians of New England were generally at their best 
when stirred by matters remote from their native inex- 
perience. 

Considering the relation of this school of history to the 
historical hterature of England, one is inevitably reminded 
that the greatest English history. Gibbon's Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire, first appeared in the very year 
of our Declaration of Independence. In one aspect, of 
course, the temper of Gibbon is as far from romantic as Gibbon, 
possible. He is the first, and in certain aspects the great- 
est, of modern philosophical historians; and his style has 
all the formality of the century during which he wrote. In 
another aspect the relation of Gibbon's history to the Eng- 
land which bred him seems very like that of our New Eng- 
land histories to the country and the life which bred their 
writers. Gibbon and our own historians alike turned to a 
larger and more splendid field than was afforded by their 
national annals. Both alike were distinctly affected by an 
alert consciousness of what excellent work had been done 
in contemporary foreign countries. Both carefully ex- . 
pressed themselves with conscientious devotion to what 
they believed the highest literary canons. Both produced 
work which has lasted not only as history but as hterature 
too. Gibbon wrote in the very year when America de- 
clared her independence of England; Prescott began his 



228 The Renaissance of New England 

work in Boston nearly sixty years later. So there is 
an aspect in which our historical literature seems to lag 
behind that of the mother country much as Irving's prose — 
contemporary with the full outburst of nineteenth-century 
romanticism in England — lags behind the prose of Gold- 
smith. 

Very cursory, all this; and there can be no doubt that 
the historians of New England, like the New England 
orators, might profitably be made the subject of minute 
and interesting separate study. Our own concern, how- 
ever, is chiefly with pure letters. Before we can deal with 
them intelligently we must glance at still other aspects of 
renascent New England. We have glanced at its oratory 
and at its scholarship. We must now turn to its religion 
and its philosophy. 



IV 

UNITARIANISM 

References 

General References: G. W. Cooke, Unitarianism hi America, 
Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902; *A. P. Peabody, 
"The Unitarians in Boston," Winsor's Memorial History of Boston, 
III, Chapter xi; James Freeman Clarke's Autobiography, Boston: 
Houghton, 1891; G. E. ElHs, Halj-Century oj the Unitarian Controversy, 
Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Co., 1857. 

CHANNING 

Works: Complete Works, Boston: American Unitarian Association, 
1886. 

Biography and Criticism: W. H. Channing, The Life of William 
Ellery Channing, Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1880; J. W. 
Chadwick, William Ellery Channing, Boston: Houghton, IQ03. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 22-24; Griswold's Prose, 162-168; Sted- 
man, 85-87; *Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 3-19. 



The life of George Ripley, whose works are no longer in print, has been 
written for the American Men of Letters Series by O. B. Frothingham 
(Boston: Houghton, 1883). There are selections from Ripley in Sted- 
inan and Hutchinson, VI, 100-106. 

Marked as was the change in the oratory and the schol- Reaction 
arship of New England during the first quarter of the nine- crwinism 
teenth century, the change in the dominant rehgious views 
of a community which had always been dominated by 
religion was more marked still. From the beginning till 
after the Revolution, the creed of New England had been 
^hc Calvinism of the Puritans. In 1809, William Ellery 

229 



230 The Renaissance of New England 

Channing, then a minister twenty-nine years old, wrote 
of this old faith: 

" Whosoever will consult the famous Assembly's Catechisms and 
Confession, will see the peculiarities of the system in all their length 
and breadth of deformity. A man of plain sense, whose spirit has 
not been broken to this creed by education or terror, will think that 
it is not necessary for us to travel to heathen countries, to learn how 
mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity." 

"How mournfully the human mind may^ misrepresent 
the Deity!" You will be at pains to lind nine words which 
shall more thoroughly express the change which the Renais- 
sance brought to the leading religious spirits of Boston. 

The resulting alteration in dogmatic theology has given 
to the new school of New England divines the name of 
Unitarians. According to the old creed, the divine char- 
acter of Christ was essential to redemption; without his 
superhuman aid all human beings were irrevocably 
doomed. But the moment you assumed human nature to 
contain adequate seeds of good, the necessity for a divine 
Redeemer disappeared. Accordingly the New England 
Unitarians discerned, singly and alone, God, who had 
made man in his image. One almost perfect image they 
recognized in Jesus Christ; a great many inferior but still 
indubitable ones they found actually living about them. 

Although this radical change in theology was what gave 
Unitarianism its name, the underlying feeling which gave 
it being had little concern with mystic dogmas. What- 
ever the philosophy of primitive Christianity, the philoso- 
phy of traditional Christianity had for centuries taught 
the depravity of human nature; this dogma the Puritans 
had brought to New England, where they had uncom- 
promisingly preserved it. Now, whatever your philosophy, 



Unitarianisjn 231 

this dogma does account for such social phenomena as 
occur in densely populated lands where economic pressure 
is strong. In our own great cities you need a buoyant 
spirit and a hopefully unobservant eye to perceive much 
besides evil; and if you compare Boston or New York 
with London or Paris, you can hardly avoid discerning, 
beneath the European civilization which is externally 
lovelier than ours, depths of evil to which we have hardly 
yet sunk. The Europe of Calvin's time seems on the 
whole even more pervasively wicked; and more wicked 
still seems that decadent Roman Empire where Augustine 
formulated the dogmas which at last Channing so unfal- 
teringly set aside. 

We need hardly remind ourselves, however, that up to simplicity 
the time of Channing the history of America, and particu- ^an Life 
larly of New England, had been a history of national ^ 
inexperience. Compared with other races, the people of 
New England, released for generations from the pressure 
of dense European life, found a considerable degree of 
goodness surprisingly practicable. This social fact re- 
sembled a familiar domestic one: an eldest child is apt 
to be angelic until some little brother gets big enough to 
interfere with him; and if by chance no little brother 
appears, the angelic traits will very likely persist until the 
child goes to school or otherwise comes in contact with 
external life. Up to the days of Channing himself, the 
Yankee race may be likened to a Puritan child gravely 
playing alone. 

So even by the time of Edwards, Calvinistic dogma and 
national inexperience were unwittingly at odds. Our 
glances at subsequent American letters must have shown 
how steadily the native human nature of America continued 



232 2Vie Benaissance of New England 

to express itself in forms which could not reasonably be 
held to be evil. In New York, for example, the first third 
of the nineteenth century produced Brockden Brown and 
Irving and Cooper and Bryant; later came Poe, WiUis, 
and the Knickerbocker School. Not eternally memorable, 
even the worst of these does not seem a bit wicked. 
Turning to certain phases of New England at about the 
same time, we saw in its public life the patriotic intensity 
of Webster and the classical personality of Everett estab- 
lishing a tradition of sustained dignity which passed only 
with Robert Charles Winthrop, who lies beneath the well- 
earned epitaph, "Eminent as a scholar, an orator, a 
statesman, and a philanthropist, — above all, a Christian." 
And when we came to the scholarship of New England, 
we found it finally ripening into the dignified pages of 
Ticknor, of Prescott, of Motley, and of Parkman. 

In a society like this, Calvinistic dogma seems constantly 
further from truth, as taught by actual life. However 
familiar to experience in dense old worlds, habitually 
abominable conduct was rather strange to the national 
inexperience of America, and particularly of renascent 
New England. Even during the eighteenth century, in- 
deed, a considerable number of ministers, particularly of 
the region about Boston, gradually and insensibly 
relaxed the full rigor of Calvinism. 
Begin- Two cvcnts will serve to typify this change. In 1785, 

Unuldan- ^^- Jamcs Freeman, minister of King's Chapel, being 
ism in compelled to revise the AngHcan Prayer Book, found him- 

jyxd.5s&c tiu~ 

setts. self conscientiously disposed so to alter the Hturgy as 

considerably to modify the dogma of the Trinity. The 
liturgy thus made, which is sometimes held to mark the 
beginning of Boston Unitarianism, differs from the forms 



U nitarianism 233 

which it displaced in its tendency to regard Christ as only 
an excellent earthly manifestation of God's creative power, 
a being whom men need only as an example not as a re- 
deemer. About twenty years after this King's Chapel 
liturgy, Harvard College succumbed to the religious ten- 
dency which that liturgy embodies. The chief theological 
chair at Harvard, the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, 
which up to 1805 had remained a seat of Calvinistic doc- 
trine, was given in that year to the Reverend Henry Ware, 
an avowed Unitarian. The orthodox party at Harvard Unitarian- 
had opposed Ware with all their might; so when he was Harvard 
made Hollis Professor, the ancestral college of Puritan New 
England was iinally handed over to Unitarianism, which 
until very recent years remained its acknowledged faith. 

Defeated at Harvard, the orthodox party retreated to 
Andover, where they founded the Theological Seminary 
which defended old Calvinism in a region abandoned to 
its enemies. Nowadays the whole thing is fading into 
history, but at first the conflict was heart-breaking. For 
on each side faith was fervent; and if the conquering 
Unitarians believed themselves to be destroying pernicious 
and ugly heresy, the Calvinists believed just as sincerely 
that in angelic guise the devil had possessed himself of 
New England. In their mood, there was a consequent 
depth of despair to which the Unitarians have hardly done 
full justice. To the Unitarian mind there has never been 
any valid reason why good men of other opinions than 
theirs should not enjoy everlasting bliss; but the very 
essence of the Calvinists' creed condemned to everlasting 
woe every human being who rejected the divinely revealed 
truth of their grimly uncompromising system. 

To suppose, however, that the founders of Unitarianism 



2o4 l^lic licnaissancc of New England 

meant to be unchristian would be totally to misunderstand 
them. They revered the Scriptures as profoundly as ever 
Calvinists did. The difference was that they discerned 
in Scripture no such teaching as the experience of old- 
world centuries had crystallized into Calvinistic dogma. 
In the lirst place, they found in the Bible no passages 
which necessarily involved the 
dogma of the Trinity. There 
might be puzzling sentences ; but 
there were also clear, constant 
statements that there is one God, 
who made man in His image. 
This assertion, they held, amounts 
to proof that men are the children 
of God, and that they have thus 
inherited from God the divine 
faculties of reason and of con- 
science. When in the Bible there 
are puzzling texts, or when in life 
there are puzzling moments, we 
need only face them with con- 
scientiously reasonable temper. If we are truly made in 
the image of God, we shall thus reach true conclusions; 
and meanwhile to guide our way, God has made that 
most excellent of his creatures, Jesus Christ. 

From this state of faith there naturally resulted in Unita- 
rianism a degree of spiritual freedom which allowed each 
minister to proclaim whatever truth presented itself to his 
conscience. Unitarianism has never formulated a creed. 
It has tacitly accepted, however, certain traditions which 
have been classically set forth by its great apostle, William 
Ellery Channing (i 780-1842). He was born at New- 




Unitarianism 285 

port; he took his degree at Harvard in 1798; and from 
1803 to 1840 he was minister at the Federal Street Church 
in Boston. 

In 1819, he preached at Bahimore, on the occasion of unitarian 
tlic ordination of Jared Sparks, his famous sermon* on j^y"^ '^'^' 
Unitarian Christianity. He took his text from i Thess. v. 
21: "Prove all things; hold fast that v^hich is good." 
His first point is that "we regard the Scriptures as the 
records of God's successive revelations to mankind, and 
particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his 
will by Jesus Christ." The Scriptures, he goes on to say, 
must be interpreted by the light of reason. So, applying 
reason to Scripture, he deduces in the first place the doc- 
trine of God's unity, " that there is one God, and one only;" 
secondly, that "Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as 
truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God ;" 
thirdly, that "God is morally perfect;" fourthly, that 
"Jesus was sent by the Father to efiect a moral or spiritual 
deliverance of mankind; that is, to rescue men from sin 
and its consequences, and to bring them to a state of ever- 
lasting purity and happiness;" and, fifthly, that "all virtue 
has its foundation in the moral nature of man, that is, in 
conscience, or his sense of duty, and in the power of form- 
ing his temper and life according to conscience." 

Human nature, Channing holds, is thus essentially good; 
man is made in the image of God, and all man need do is 
to follow the light which God has given him. The greatest 
source of that light, of course, is Christ. Whether Christ 
was literally the son of God or not makes no difference: he 
walked the earth ; he was the most perfect of men ; and we 
can follow him. He was human and so are we. In earthly 

* Works, Boston and New York, 1853, vol. Ill, pp. 59-103. 



236 The Renaissance of New England 

life he could avoid damnation, and all we need do is to 
behave as nearly like him as we can. If the false teachings 
of an outworn heresy make all this reasonable truth seem 
questionable, look about you. Do your friends deserve, 
as in that sermon of Edwards's, to be held suspended by a 
spider-like thread over a fiery furnace into which they 
may justly be cast at any moment; or rather, for all their 
faults and errors, do they not merit eternal mercy? So 
if all of us try to do our best, is there any reasonable 
cause for fearing that everything shall not ultimately go 
right ? The old Unitarians looked about them and hon- 
unitarian- cstly found human nature reassuring, 
trastedwith What finally distinguishes early Unitarianism from the 
Calvinism. Calvinism which it supplanted, is this respect for what is 
good in human nature as contrasted with the Calvinistic 
insistence on what is bad. What is good needs encourage- 
ment; what is bad needs checking. What is good merits 
freedom; what is bad demands control. Obedience to 
authority, the Calvinists held, may reveal in you the 
tokens of salvation; spiritual freedom, the Unitarians 
maintained, must result in spiritual growth. For a dog- 
matic dread they substituted an inimitable hope. Evil 
and sin, sorrow and weakness, they did not deny;, but 
trusting in the infinite goodness of God, they could not 
believe evil or sin, the sorrows or the weaknesses of 
humanity, to be more than passing shadows. Inspired 
with this newly hopeful spirit, they held their way through 
the New F^ngland whose better sort were content for half 
a century to follow them. Personally these early leaders 
of Unitarianism were, as any list * of their names will 

* Such, for example, as that in the article on "Unitarianism in 
Boston," contributed by Dr. Andrew P. Peabody to Winsor's Memorial 
History of Boston, Vol. Ill, Chaj). xi. 



Unitanams7R 237 

show, a company of such sweet, pure, noble spirits as 
must arouse in men who dwell with them a deep respect 
for human nature. In them the national inexperience of 
America permitted almost unrestrained the development 
of a moral purity which to those who possess it makes 
the grim philosophy of damnation seem an ill-conceived 
nursery tale. 

The Unitarianism of New England, of course, was not 
unique either theologically or philosophically. In its 
isolated home, however, it developed one feature which 
distinguishes its early career from similar phases of relig- 
ious history elsewhere. The personal purity and moral 
beauty of its leaders combined with their engaging the- 
ology to effect the rapid social conquest of the whole region 
about Boston. We have seen how King's Chapel and 
Harvard College passed into Unitarian hands. The same 
was true of nearly all the old Puritan churches. The First 
Church of Boston, John Cotton's, became Unitarian; so 
did the Second Church, which throughout their lives the 
Mathers had held as such a stronghold of orthodoxy; so 
did various other New England churches. 

This general conquest of ecclesiastical strongholds by The 
the Unitarians deeply affected the whole structure of Mas- r° suu 
sachusetts society. Elsewhere in America, perhaps, and 
surely in England, Unitarianism has generally presented 
itself as dissenting dissent, and has consequently been ex 
posed to the kind of social disfavor which aggressive radi- 
calism is apt to involve. In the isolated capital of isolated 
New England, on the other hand, where two centuries had 
established such a rigid social system, the capture of the 
old churches meant the capture, too, of almost every 
social stronghold. In addition to its inherent charm, the 



238 The Renaissance of New England 

early Unitarianism of Massachusetts was strengthened 
by all the force of fashion : whoever clung to the older faith 
did so at his social peril. This fact is nowhere more evi- 
dent than in the history of New England letters. Almost 
everybody who attained literary distinction in New Eng- 
land during the nineteenth century was either a Unitarian 
or closely associated with Unitarian influences. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 

References 
General Authorities: O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in 
New England, New York: Putnam, 1876. 

THE DIAL 

The Dial: a Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, 4 vols., 
Boston, 1844, has been reprinted by the Rowfant Club, of Cleveland, 
Ohio, in sixteen parts, Cleveland, 1900-1903. For biography and 
criticism, see G. W. Cooke, An Historical and Biographical Introduction 
to accompany the Dial as reprinted in Numbers for The Rowfant Club, 
2 vols., Cleveland: The Rowfant Club, 1902. 

MARGARET FULLER 

There is no collected edition of Margaret Fuller's works. For a list of 
the separate volumes, which are now out of print, see Foley, 1 00-101. 
The life of Margaret Fuller has been written by Thomas Wentworth 
Higginson (Boston: Houghton, 1884) for the American Men of Letters 
series. Selections from Margaret Fuller are in Duyckinck, IL 527- 
528; Griswold's Prose, 538-539; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 520-527. 

BROOK FARM 

Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm: Its Members, Scliolars, and Visitors, New 
York: Macmillan, 1900. 

Though wc have followed the oratory, the scholarship, 
and the Unitarianism of New England almost to the pres- 
ent time, there has been reason for considering them be- 
fore the other phases of Renaissance in that isolated region 
where the nineteenth century produced such a change. 
At various times we have touched on the fact that the 
period from 1798 to 1832 — marked in England by every- 

239 



tionary 
Spirit. 



240 The Reriaissarice of New England 

thing between the Lyrical Ballads and the death of Scott, 
and in America by all the New York literature from Brock- 
den Brown to Bryant — really comprised an epoch in the 
literary history of both countries. It was during this 
period that the three phases of intellectual life which we 
have now considered fully declared themselves in New 
England; and in these years nothing else of equal im- 
portance developed there. 

The very mention of the dates in question should remind 
us that throughout the English-speaking world the revo- 
Revoiu- lutionary spirit was in the air. The essence of this spirit 
is its fervid faith in the excellence of human nature; let 
men be freed from all needless control, it holds, and they 
may be trusted to work out their salvation. In the old 
world, where the force of custom had been gathering for 
centuries, the speech and behavior of enfranchised hu- 
manity were apt to take extravagant form. In America, 
on the other hand, where the one thing which had been 
most lacking was the semblance of polite civilization, the 
very impulse which in Europe showed itself destructive 
appeared in a form which at first makes it hard to recog- 
nize. 

One need not ponder long, however, to feel, even in 
this staid new America, a note as fresh as was the most 
extravagant revolutionary expression in Europe. Our 
elaborately rhetorical oratory, to be sure, and our decorous 
scholarship, seem on the surface far from revolutionary; 
and so does the gently insignificant literature which was 
contemporary with them a bit further south. Yet all 
alike were as different from anything which America had 
uttered before as was the poetry of Wordsworth or of Shel- 
ley from what had previously been known in England. 



Transcendentalism 241 

When we came to the Unitarianism of New England, the 
revolutionary spirit showed itself more plainly. The 
creed of Channing was of a kind which, except for the un- 
usual chance of immedite social dominance, might almost 
at once have revealed its disintegrant character. 

But the enfranchised human nature of New England 
at first expressed itself in no more appalling forms than 
the oratory of Webster or of Everett; than the Anthology 
Club, the Boston AthcniEum, and the North American 
Review; than the saintly personality and the hopeful 
exhortations of Channing. Under such mildly revolu- 
tionary influences as these the new generation of Boston 
grew up, which was to find expression a few years later. 

In all such considerations as this there is danger of tak- 
ing consecutive phases of development too literally. To 
say that Unitarianism caused the subsequent manifesta- 
tion of free thought in New England would be too much ; 
but no one can doubt that the world-wide revolutionary 
spirit, of which the first New England manifestation was 
the religious revolution effected by Unitarianism, impelled 
the following generation to that outbreak of intellectual 
and spiritual anarchy which is generally called Tran- 
scendentalism. 

This queerly intangible Transcendentalism can best be what 
understood by recurring to the text of Channing's cele- dlnt^riism 
brated sermon on Unitarian Christianity. "Prove all taught, 
things; hold fast that which is good." Prove all things; 
do not accept tradition; scrutinize whatever presents itself 
to you. If evil, cast it aside; if good, cherish it as 
a gift of God. To this principle Channing adhered all 
his life; but Channing's life was essentially clerical; it 
was that of a conscientious and disinterested religious 



242 The Renaissance of New England 

teacher, whose great personal authority was strengthened 
by rare purity of nature. Educated in something hke the 
old school of theology, he generally consecrated his devout 
boldness of thought to religious matters. 

In the generation which grew up under the influence 
of which Channing is the most distinguished type, the 
Revoiu- revolutionary spirit declared itself more plainly. The 
s°iru of traditional education of New England had been con- 
channing's flncd to thcology, to classics and mathematics, and to the 
Common Law. It had indulged itself in speculative phi- 
losophy only so far as that philosophy aided theology or 
jurisprudence. Meanwhile it had paid little attention to 
the modern literature even of England, and none at all to 
that of other languages than English. Obviously there 
were many things in this world which intelligent young 
Yankees might advantageously prove, with a view to dis- 
covering whether they were worth holding fast. To say 
that they did so in obedience to Channing's specific teach- 
ings would be mistaken; but certainly in obedience to the 
same motive which induced his choice of that Thcssa- 
lonian text, the more active and vigorous young minds of 
New England attacked, wherever they could find them, 
the records of human wisdom. They wished to make 
up their minds as to what they believed about everything 
and to do so with no more deference to any authority 
than that authority seemed rationally to deserve. 

The name commonly given to the unsystematized results 
at which they arrived — widely differing with every indi- 
vidual's apt. However they differed, these impulsive 
and untrained philosophical thinkers of renascent New 
England were idealists. With the aid of reading as wide 
as their resources would allow, they endeavored to give 



Transcendentalism 243 

themselves an account of what the universe really means. 
They became aware that our senses perceive only the 
phenomena of life,, and that behind these phenomena, 
beyond the range of human senses, lurk things not phe- 
nomenal. The evolutionary philosophy which has fol- idealism, 
lowed theirs holds a similar conception; it divides all things 
into two groups, — the phenomenal or knowable, concern- 
ing which our knowledge can be tested by observation or 
experiment; and the unknowable, concerning which no 
observation or experiment can prove anything. With 
scientific hardness of head evolutionary philosophy conse- 
c{uently confines its energies to phenom.ena. With un- 
scientific enthusiasm for freedom the first enfranchised 
thinkers of New England troubled themselves little about 
I>hcnomena, and devoted their energies to thinking and 
talking about that great group of undemonstrable truths 
which must always transcend human experience. In so 
doing, we can see now, they followed an instinct innate in 
their race. They were descended from two centuries of 
Puritanism; and though the Puritans exerted their 
]:»hilosophic thought within dogmatically fixed limits, 
they were intense idealists too. Their whole tempera- 
mental energy was concentrated in efforts definitely to 
perceive absolute truths quite beyond the range of any 
earthly senses. The real distinction between the Puritan 
idealists and the Transcendental idealists of the nineteenth 
century proves little more than that the latter discarded all 
dogmatic limit. Obey yourself, they said, and you need 
have no fear. All things worth serious interest transcend 
human experience; but a trustworthy clew to them is to be 
found in the unfathomable excellence of human minds, 
souls, and spirits. 



244 Tlie Renaissance of New England 

Though very possibly no single Transcendentalist 
would have accepted so baldly stated a creed, some such 
system may be conceived as the ideal toward which 
Transcendentahsts generally tended. With a temper 
which, however it began, soon developed into this hope- 
ful, impalpable philosophy, the more ardent youths who 
grew up in Boston when its theology was dominated by 
Unitarianism, and when its scholarship was at last so 
enlarged as to include the whole range of human learning, 
faced whatever human records they could find, to prove 
and to hold fast those which were good. 
Three The influences thus brought to bear on New England 

encesupon ^crc almost innumerable, but among them two or three 
New ^pj-g specially evident. The most important was prob- 

Thought. ably German thought, at a time when German philosophy 
was most metaphysical and German literature most ro- 
mantic. This, indeed, had had great influence on con- 
temporary England. No two men of letters in the nine- 
teenth century more evidently affected English thought 
than Coleridge and Carlyle ; and both were saturated with 
German philosophy. To New England these influences 
swiftly spread. In 1800, it has been said, hardly a Ger- 
man book could be found in Boston. Before Channing 
died, in 1842, you could find in Boston few educated people 
who could not talk about German philosophy, German 
literature, and German music* Another thing which 
appears very strongly in Transcendental writings is the 
influence of French eclectic philosophy. At one time the 

* George Ripley started in 1838 a series of Specimens oj Foreign Stand- 
ard Literature, which greatly quickened New England thought by intro- 
ducing translations of Jouffroy, De Wette, Cousin, Goethe, Schiller, and 
other French and German writers. 



Transcendentalism 245 

names of Jouffroy and Cousin were as familiar to Yankee 
ears as were those of Locke or Descartes or Kant. Per- 
haps more heartily still this whole school of enthusiastic , 
seekers for truth welcomed that wide range of modern 
literature, English and foreign alike, which was at last 
thrown open by such scholars as Ticknor, Longfellow, and 
Lowell. 

For this almost riotous dehght in pure Hterature there 
was a reason now long past. The Puritans generally had 
such conscientious objections to fine art that only at the 
moment to which we are now come could the instinct of 
native New England for culture conscientiously be satis- 
fied. The Renaissance of New England, therefore, was 
in no aspect more truly renascent than in the unfeigned 
eagerness with which it welcomed the newly discovered 
fine arts. The Transcendental youth of New England 
delighted in excellent modern literature and music as 
unaffectedly as fifteenth-century Itahans delighted in the 
freshly discovered manuscripts of classic Greek. 

In one way or another this Transcendental movement The Dial, 
affected almost all the ardent natures of New England 
from 1825 to 1840. In that year it found final expression 
in the Dial, a quarterly periodical which flourished until 
1844. Its first editor was among the most characteristic 
figures of TranscendentaHsm. This was a woman, re- 
garded in her own time as the prophetess of the new move- 
ment, and prevented by a comparatively early death from 
struggling through days when the movement had spent its 
force. 

Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was the Margaret 
daughter of an eccentric but very assertive citizen of 
Cambridge. Educated by her father according to his 



246 The Renaissance of New England 

own ideas, she was much overstimulated in youth. She 
became editor of the Dial in 1840. In 1842 she rehn- 
quished the editorship to Emerson, and removed to New 
York. Horace Greeley, whose sympathy with New Eng- 
land reformers was always encouraging, had invited her 
to become the literary critic of the New York Tribune. 
A little later she strayed to Italy, where, in the revolu- 
tionary times of 1847, she married a gentleman named 
Ossoli, an Italian patriot some years younger than 
herself. She was in Rome during the siege of 1848, and 
two years later started for America with her husband, 
virtually an exile, and her child. The ship on which 
they were journeying was wrecked off Fire Island; all 
three were lost. In 1839 Margaret Fuller had translated 
Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; later she pub- 
lished Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) ^^id 
Papers on Literature and Art (1846). And, as we have 
seen, she was the first editor of the Dial. 
Purpose of The prccisc purpose of the Dial is hard to state; it 
belongs with that little company of short-lived periodicals 
which now and then endeavor to afford everybody a full 
opportunity to say anything. The deepest agreement of 
Transcendentalism was in the conviction that the individ- 
ual has a natural right to believe for himself and freely 
to express his behef. In a community so dominated by 
tradition as New England, meanwhile, a community of 
which the most characteristic periodical up to this time 
had been the North American Review, freedom of speech 
in print, though not theoretically denied, was hardly prac- 
ticable. With a mission little more limited than this ideal 
of freedom, the Dial started. " I would not have it too 
purely literary," Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller. " I 



the Dial. 



Transcendentalism 



247 



wish that we might make a journal so broad and great 
in its survey that it should lead the opinion of this 
generation on every great interest . . . and publish 
chapters on every head in the whole art of living." 

Though the Dial was impractical, never circulated 
much, and within four years came to a hopeless financial 
end, its pages arc at once more interesting and more sen- 
sible than tradition has repre- 
sented them. Of the waiters, 
to be sure, few have proved 
immortal. Bronson A 1 c o 1 1 
and Theodore Parker seem 
fading with Margaret Fuller 
into mere memories; and 
George Ripley has become 
more nebulous still. But Tho- 
reau was of the company ; and 
so was Emerson, who bids fair 
to survive the rest much as 
Shakspere has survived the 
other Elizabethan dramatists. 
Emerson, Thoreau, and some others of the Transcen- 
dental group we shall consider in later chapters; but at this 
point we must very briefly glance at some of their minor 
literary contemporaries. One was the eccentric Jones 
Very (1813-1880), licensed to preach, but never ordained, 
a few of whose poems show something near genius. 
Another was Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892), 
painter and poet, whose Last of the Hugger muggers (1856) 
used to be a favorite book with children. Larger figures 
in the group were William Henry Channing (1810-1884) 
and William Ellery Channing, the younger (1818- 




Minor 

Transcen- 

dentalists. 



248 The Renaissance of New England 

1891); yet neither is generally remembered very dis- 
tinctly. They were nephews of the Unitarian apostle; 
and one of them was the author of the familiar line, 

" If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea." 

Far more noteworthy is the Reverend James Freeman 
Clarke (1810-1888), pastor from 1841 until 1888 of the 
Church of the Disciples, in Boston, a potent advocate 
of antislavery, a stout supporter of all rational measures 
of reform, a fearless theologian, and author, among other 
writings, of Ten Great Religions (1871). His contribu- 
tions to the Dial are chiefly in verse, a fact which is deeply 
characteristic of the period. People who were later apt 
to express themselves in prose were then moved to write 
in verse, usually ephemeral. Among them were Miss 
Elizabeth Peabody, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Orestes 
Brownson. For our purpose we need mention no more 
names. These people lived and- helped to make the 
Transcendental movement possible; what they wrote did 
not much affect the history of pure letters. Above these 
rises Emerson, a Transcendentalist with a lasting mes- 
sage. But to him we shall turn in our next chapter. 

That the Dial shows Emerson's relation to his fellow 
Transcendentahsts is perhaps what now makes it most 
significant. No eminent literary figure can grow into 
existence without a remarkable environment, and the 
pages of the Dial gradually reveal the rather vigorous en- 
vironment of Emerson's most active years. This vigor, 
however, appears more plainly in the earlier numbers, 
which, merely as literature, are often unexpectedly 
good. As you turn the pages of the later numbers you 
feel that the thought tends to grow more vague; the kinds 



Transcendentalism 



249 



of reform grow more various and wilder; and, above all, 
the tendency, so fatal to periodical literature, of running 
to inordinate length, becomes more and more evident. 
From beginning to end, however, the Dial is fresh in feel- 
ing, wide in scope, earnest in its search for truth, and less 




:f/' .^ 



BROOK FARM. 



eccentric than you would have thought possible. For all 
its ultimate failure, it leaves a final impression not only of 
hopefulness, but of sanity. 

Though the Dial had little positive cohesion, its writers itE spirit, 
and all the Transcendentalists, of whom we may take them 
as representative, were almost at one as ardent opponents 
of lifeless traditions. Generally idealists, they were stirred 
to emotional fervor by their detestation of any stiffening 
orthodoxy, even though that orthodoxy were so far from 
dogmatic as Unitarianism. And naturally passing from 
things of the mind and the soul to things of that palpable 
part of human nature, the body, they found themselves 
generally eager to alter the affairs of this world for the 



250 The Renaissance of New Eiigland 

The better. If any one word could certainly arouse their sym- 

fdvoc^ted pathetic enthusiasm, it was the word "reform." Two 
by the Dial, distinct refomis the Dial fervently advocated. The more 
specific, which reached its highest development later, was 
the abolition of slavery, a measure important enough in 
the intellectual history of New England to deserve separate 
discussion.* The more general, which developed, flour- 
ished, and failed decidedly before the antislavery move- 
ment became a political force, was that effort to reform 
the structure of society which found expression in the 
community of Brook Farm. 
Brook In 1841, a number of people, — all in sympathy with the 

Farm. Transccndcntalists, and most of them writers for the Dial, 
— bought a farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, ten 
or twelve miles from Boston. Here they proposed to 
found a community, where everybody should work to 
support the establishment and where there should be 
plenty of leisure for scholarly and edifying pleasure. 
Incidentally there was to be a school, where children were 
to help in the work of the community. The experiment 
began. At least during its earlier years. Brook Farm 
attracted considerable notice, and the sympathetic atten- 
tion of many people afterward more eminent than its 
actual members. Hawthorne came thither for a while, 
and his Blithedale Romance is an idealized picture of 
the establishment. Emerson, though never an actual 
member, was there off and on, always with shrewd, 
kindly interest. Thither, too, occasionally came Margaret 
Fuller, whom some have supposed to be the original of 
Hawthorne's Zenobia. 

Brook Farm, of course, was only a Yankee expression 

* See Chapter viii. 



Transcendentalism 251 

of the world-old impulse to get rid of evil by establishing 
life on principles different from those of economic law. 
From earliest times, theoretical writers have proposed 
various forms of communistic existence as a solution of 
the problems presented by the sin and suffering of human 
beings in any dense population. The principles definitely 
adopted by the Brook Farm community in 1844 were 
those of Fourier, a French philosopher, who sketched out 
a rather elaborate ideal society. The basis of his system 
was that people should separate themselves into small 
phalanxes, each mutually helpful and self-supporting. 
This conception so commended itself to the Brook 
Farmers that, at an expense decidedly beyond their 
means, they actually built a phalanstery, or communal 
residence, as nearly as might be on the lines which 
Fourier suggested. 

Brook Farm inevitably went to pieces. Its members 
were not skilled enough in agriculture to make farming 
pay; and, although after the Dial stopped they managed Disintegra- 
to publish several numbers of a similar magazine called 
The Harbinger, they found manual labor too exhausting 
to permit much activity of mind. They also discerned 
with more and more certainty that when you get together 
even so small a company of human beings as are com- 
prised in one of Fourier's phalanxes, you cannot avoid 
uncomfortable incompatibility of temper. In 1847 their 
new phalanstery, which had cost ten thousand dollars 
and had almost exhausted their funds, was burned down; 
it was not insured, and before long the whole community 
had to break up. 

The Dial had come to its end three years before. Tran- 
scendentalism proved unable long to express itself in 



252 The Renaissance of New England 



any coherent form. Yet many of those who were con- 
nected with Brook Farm never relapsed into common- 
place. George Ripley (i 802-1 880), the chief spirit of 
the community, became the literary critic of the New 
York Tribune, with which he retained his connection to 
the end of a long and honorable life. Charles Anderson 
_^.^ Dana (1819-1897), also for a 

while connected with the Trib- 
une, finally became editor of 
the New York Sun. George 
William Curtis (1824-1892), 
who became associated with 
the periodicals published by 
the Harpers, maintained more 
of the purely ideal quality of 
his early days. John Sulli- 
van DwiGHT (1813-1839) re- 
turned to Boston, where, as 
editor of the Journal 0} Music, 
he did rather more than any 
one else to make the city a 
x\nd so in various ways Brook 
Farm faded into the memory of an earnest, sincere, 
beautiful effort to make human life better by practising 
the principles of ideal truth. 

This New England Transcendentalism developed most 
vigorously in those years when the intellectual life of 
New York was embodied in the Knickerbocker school of 
writers. By contrasting those two neighboring phases 
of thought we can see how unalterably New England kept 
the trace of its Puritan origin, eagerly aspiring to knowl- 
edge of absolute truth. The hterature of the Knicker- 




vital centre of musical art. 



Transcendentalism 253 

bocker school was never more than a htcrature of pleasure. Summary. 
Even the lesser literature of Transcendentahsm, not to 
speak of its permanent phases, constantly and earnestly 
aspired to be a hterature of both knowledge and power, 
seeking in the eternities for new ranges of truth which 
should broaden, sweeten, strengthen, and purify mankind. 
In brief, the Transcendentalism of New England was 
not, Hke that of Germany, a system of pure philosophy. 
Nor was it, like that of England, primarily a phase of 
literature. New England Transcendentalism was above 
all a revolution in conduct, a crusade for the spontaneous 
expression in every possible form of that individual 
human nature which Calvinism had thought deserving 
of confinement and rebuke. 



VI 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

References 

Works: Works, Riverside Edition, 12 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1883- 
1893. A new ("Centenary") edition, with additional text and notes, is 
now being published (Boston: Houghton). 

Biography and Criticism: *J. E. Cabot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 
Memoir, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1887; *0. W. Holmes, Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, Boston: Houghton, 1885 (aml); Richard Garnett, Lije of 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, London: Scott, 1888 (gw); Matthew Arnold, 
"Emerson," in Discourses in America; J. R. Lowell, "Emerson the 
Lecturer," in Lowell's Works, Riverside Edition, I, 349 ff.; J. J. Chap- 
man, "Emerson, Sixty Years After," Atlantic Monthly, January-Febru- 
ary, 1897, reprinted in Emerson and Other Essays, New York: Scribner, 
1898; *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter v. 

Bibliography: Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. i-xiv (at 
the end); Foley, 80-85. 

Selections: *Carpenter, 194-212; Duyckinck, II, 366-372; Griswold, 
Prose, 442-446; Griswold, Poetry, 299-304; Stedman, 90-101; *Stedman 
and Hutchinson, VI, 128-166. 

As time passes, it grows more and more clear that by far 
the most eminent hgure among the Transcendentahsts, if 
not indeed in all the literary history of America, was Ralph 
Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). People not yet past mid- 
dle age still remember his figure, which so beautifully em- 
bodied the gracious dignity, the unpretentious scope, and 
the unassuming distinction of those who led the New 
Life. England Renaissance. Born at Boston and descended 

from a long line of ministers, he was as truly a New Eng- 
land Brahmin as was Cotton Mather, a century and a half 

254 



Ralph Waldo Emerson 255 

before. His father was minister of the First Church of 
Boston, already Unitarian, but still maintaining unbroken 
the organization which had been founded by John Cotton 
at the settlement of the town. The elder Emerson died 
early. His sons were brought up in poverty; but they 
belonged on both sides to that hereditary clerical class 
whose distinction was still independent of so material an 
accident as fortune. In 182 1 Waldo Emerson graduated 
from Harvard College, where, as his "Notes on Life and 
Letters in New England" record, the teaching of Edward 
Everett was liUing the air with renascent enthusiasm. 
After graduation Emerson supported himself for a few 
years by school-teaching, studying meanwhile his hered- 
itary profession of divinity. In 1829 he was made col- 
league to the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., pastor of the 
Second Church in Boston. This was the church which 
had remained for above sixty years in charge of the 
Mathers. His ministerial career thus began in hneal 
succession to Cotton Mather's own. Mr. Ware, infirm in 
health, soon resigned; and before Emerson was thirty 
years old, he had become the regular minister of the Second 
Church. 

Giving up his pastorate in 1832 because he was "not 
interested" in the Lord's Supper and so thought he ought 
not to administer the communion, he supported himself 
as a lecturer, occasionally preaching. He went abroad 
for a year, and there began that friendship with Carlyle 
which resulted in their lifelong correspondence. In 1836 
appeared his first book, Nature, a bewildering but stimu- Early 
lating expression of the ideahsm which was the basis of 
his philosophy. In 1837 he gave, before the Phi Beta 
Kappa Society of Harvard College, his celebrated address 



Writings. 



256 The Renaissance of New England 

on "The American Scholar," of which the closing 
sentences are among the most articulate assertions of his 
individualism : — 

"If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and 
there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, — 
patience; with the shades of all the good and great for company; and 
for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the 
study and communication of principles, the making those instincts 
prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace 
in the world not to be an unit; — not to be reckoned one charac- 
ter; — not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created 
to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the 
thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our 
opinion predicted geographically, as the north or the south? Not 
so, brothers and friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We 
will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we 
will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall no longer be a 
name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of 
man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of 
joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because 
each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires 
all men." 

The next year, his address before the Divinity School 
at Cambridge carried his gospel of individualism to a 
point which frightened Harvard theology itself. In such 
a spirit he went on lecturing and writing all his life. 

Emerson's work is so individual that one can probably 
get no true impression of it without reading deeply for 
one's self. As one thus grows famiUar with him, his most 
characteristic trait begins to seem one which in a certain 
sense is not individual at all, but rather is common to all 
phases of lasting literature. Classical immortality, of 
course, is demonstrable only by the lapse of cumulating 



Ralph Waldo Emerson 257 

(igcs. One thing, however, seems sure: in all acknowl- 
edged classics, there proves to reside a vitality which as the 
centuries pass shows itself less and less conditioned by the 
human circumstances of the writers. No literary expression 
was ever quite free from historical environment. Homer 
— one poet or many — belongs to the heroic age of Greece; 
Virgil, or Horace, to Augustan Rome; Dante to the Italy 
of Guelphs and Ghibellines; Shakspere to Elizabethan 
England. But take at random any page from any of these, 
and you will find something so broadly, pervasively, last- 
ingly human, that generation after generation will read 
it with no sense of the changing epochs which have passed 
since the man who spoke this word and the men for Perma- 
whom it was spoken have rested in immortal slumber. "ty"in^"^^' 
In the work of Emerson, whatever its final value, there is Emerson's 
something of this note. Every other writer at whom we 
have glanced, and almost every other at whom we shall 
glance hereafter, demands for understanding that we 
revive our sympathy with the fading or faded conditions 
which surrounded his conscious life. At best these 
other works, vitally contemporaneous in their own days, 
grow more and more old-fashioned. Emerson's work, 
on the other hand, bids fair to disregard the passing 
of time; its spirit seems little more conditioned by the cir- 
cumstances of nineteenth-century Concord or Boston than 
Homer's was by the old ^gean breezes. 

In form, however, Emerson's work seems almost as 
certainly local. Broadly speaking, it falls into two classes, 
— essays and poems.* The essays are generally com- 

* Emerson's writings, as they have been gathered into the twelve vol- 
umes of the Riverside edition, comprise: Nature, etc., 1836; Essays, 
1841, 1844; Representative Men, 1850; English Traits, 1856; The Con- 



258 The Renaissance of New England 



Their Form poscd of materials which he collected for purposes of Icc- 
Locai. turing. His astonishing lack of method is familiar; he 

would constantly make note of any idea which occurred 
to him; and when he wished to give a lecture, he would 
huddle together as many of his notes as should fill the 
assigned time. But though this bewildering lack of sys- 
tem for a moment disguised the true character of his essays, 
the fact that these essays were so 
often delivered as lectures should 
remind us of what they really are. 
The Yankee lecturers, of whom 
Emerson was the most eminent, 
were only half-secularized preach- 
ers, — men who stood up and talked 
to eagerly attentive audiences, who 
were disposed at once to respect 
the authority of their teachers, to 
be on the look-out for error, and to 
JXyOi/a/^iy (^f^i^-^Y^ go home with a sense of edification. 
Emerson's essays, in short, prove 
to be a development from the endless sermons with which 
for generations his ancestors had been accustomed to 
''entertain the People of God." In much the same way, 
Emerson's poems, for all their oddity of form, prove on 
consideration to possess many qualities for which an ortho- 
dox mind would have sought expression in hymns. They 
are designed not so much to set forth human emotion 
or to give aesthetic delight as to stimulate moral or spiritual 

dtict of Life, i860; Society and Soliliide, 1870; Letters and Social Aims, 
1876; Poems, 1876; Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883-84); Mis- 
cellanies (1883-84); The Natural History oj Intellect and Other Papers, 
1893. The volumes after which the dates are in parentheses contain 
articles not previously published. 




Ralph Waldo Emerson 259 

ardor. All Emerson's individualism could not prevent his 
being a good old inbred Yankee preacher. A Yankee 
preacher of unfettered idealism, one may call him; better 
still, its seer, its prophet. 

Idealism, of course, is ancestrally familiar to any race of Emerson's 
Puritan origin. That life is a fleeting manifestation of un- 
fathomable realities which lie beyond it, that all we see and 
all we do and all we know are merely symbols of things 
unseen, unactable, unknowable, had been preached to 
New England from the beginning. But Emerson's ideal- 
ism soared far above that of the Puritan fathers. Their 
effort was constantly to reduce unseen eternities to a system 
as rigid as that of the physical universe. To Emerson, 
on the other hand, all systems grouped themselves 
with the little facts of every-day existence as merely 
symbols of unspeakable, unfathomable, transcendental 
truth. There is forever something beyond; you may call 
it Nature, you may call it Over-Soul; each name becomes 
a fresh limitation, a mere symbolic bit of this human lan- 
guage of ours. The essential thing is not what you call the 
everlasting eternities; it is that you shall never cease, 
simply and reverently, with constantly living interest, to 
recognize and to adore them. 

Would you strive to reconcile one with another the 
glories of this eternity? strive, with your petty human 
powers, to prove them consistent things ? — 

"Why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag 
about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you 
have stated in this or that pubHc place? Suppose you should con- 
tradict yourself: what then? ... A foolish consistency is the 
hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers 
and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. 



260 The Renaissance of New England 

He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall. Speak 
what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to- 
morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything 
you have said to-day. . . . Pythagoras was misunderstood, and 
Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and 
Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be 
great is to be misunderstood." 

Self- In Emerson's calm impatience of philosophic system 

Reiiaice. i\^qyc is a frcsh touch of his unhesitating self-rehance. 
"See," he seems to bid you, "and report what you see as 
truly as language will let you. Then concern yourself no 
more as to what men shall say of your seeing or of your 
saying." For even though what you perceive be a gleam 
of absolute truth, the moment you strive to focus its radi- 
ance in the little terms of human language, you must limit 
the diffusive energy which makes it radiant. • So even 
though your gleams be in themselves consistent one with 
another, your poor little vehicle of words, conventional 
and faint symbols with which mankind has learned to 
blunder, must perforce dim each gleam by a limitation 
itself irreconcilable with truth. Language at best was 
made to phrase what later philosophy has called the 
knowable, and what interested Emerson surged infinitely 
throughout the unknowable realms. 

Take that famous passage from his essay in Society and 
5(?/i/w(/e, on "Civilization": — ' ' "^^^ 

" 'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war,' that 
the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.'. Hitch your 
wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot 
and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We 
shall find all their teams going the other way, — Charles's Wain, 
Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules ; every god will leave us. Work 



Baliih Waldo Emerson 261 

rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote — 
justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility." 

Though imperfect in melody, this seems an almost lyric 
utterance of something which all men may know and which 
no man may define. "Hitch your wagon to a star" has 
flashed into the idiom of our speech; but if you try to 
translate it into visual terms you must find it a mad meta- 
phor. The wagon is no real rattling vehicle of the Yankee 
country, squahd in its dingy blue; nor is the star any such 
as ever twinkled through the clear New England nights. 
No chain ever forged could reach far on the way from a 
Concord barn to Orion. Yet behind the homely, incom- 
plete symbol there is a thought, an emotion, flashing swifter 
than ever ray of starry light, and so binding together the 
smallest things and the greatest that for an instant we may 
feel them both alike in magnitude, each alike mere sym- 
bols of illimitable truth beyond, and both together sig- 
nificant only because for an instant we have snatched them 
together, almost at random, from immeasurable eternity. 

For phenomena, after all, arc only symbols of the eterni- 
ties, and words at their best are trivial, fleeting, conven- 
tional symbols of these mere phenomena : — 

"Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The 
length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the 
speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in 
any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, 
no words would be suffered. " 

So Emerson disdained words; and hardly cared how 
he set forth the shifting aspects of truth, as they passed 
before his untiring earthly vision. 

A dangerous feat, this. Any one may attempt it, but 



262 The Renaissance of New England 

most of us would surely fail, uttering mere jargon wherein 
others could discern little beyond our several limitations. 
As we contemplate Emerson, our own several infirmities 
accordingly reveal to us more and more clearly how true a 
seer he was. With more piercing vision than is granted 
to common men, he really perceived in the eternities those 
living facts and lasting thoughts which, with all the cool 
serenity of his intellectual assurance, he rarely troubled 
himself intelligibly to phrase. 

Sometimes these perceptions fairly fell within the range 
of language; and of language at such moments Emerson 
had wonderful mastery. Open his essays at random. 
On one page you shall find phrases like this: — 

"By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until 
it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of 
light, we see and know each other." 

On another, which deals with Friendship, comes this 
fragment of an imaginary letter: — 

"I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable, and I respect 
thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in 
thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious 
torment." 

And there are hundreds of such felicitous passages. 
Often, however, Emerson was face to face with perceptions 
for which language was never framed; and then comes 
such half-inspired jargon as that little verse which pre- 
ludes the essay on "History:" 

"I am the owner of the sphere. 
Of the seven stars, and the solar year, 
Of Csesar's hand, and Plato's brain, 
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain." 



Ralph Waldo Emerson 263 

So long as what he said seemed for the moment true, he 
cared for Httle else. 

Again, one grows to feel more and more in Emerson a Emerson's 
trait surprising in any man so saturated with ideal philoso- tion Ynd 
phy. As the story of Brook Farm indicated, the Tran- ^^^^ 

Sense. 

scendental movement generally expressed itself in ways 
which, whatever their purity, beauty, or sincerity, had not 
the virtue of common sense. In the slang of our day, the 
Transcendentalists were cranks. With Emerson the case 
was different; in the daily conduct of his private life, as 
well as in the articulate utterances which pervade even his 
most eccentric writings, you will always find him, despite 
the vagaries of his ideal philosophy, a shrewd, sensible 
Yankee, full of a quiet, repressed, but ever present sense 
of humor which prevented him from overestimating him- 
self, and compelled him even when dealing with spiritual 
phenomena to be relatively practical. 

He did not phrase his discoveries in the sacred mysteries 
of dogma. He was rather a canny, honest Yankee gen- 
tleman, who mingled with his countrymen, and taught 
them as well as he could; who felt a kindly humor when 
other people agreed with him, and troubled himself little 
when they disagreed; who hitched his wagon to star 
after star, but never really confused the stars with the 
wagon. 

And so descending to Concord earth, we find in him a Effect up- 

trait very characteristic of the period when he happened "^^ ^^^ ° 

to live, and one at which he himself would have been the Knowl- 
edge of 
first good-humoredly to smile. He was born just when Phiios- 

the Renaissance of New England was at hand, when at Letters*"^ 

last theology, classics, and law were seen not to be the 

only basis of the human intellect, when all philosophy and 



264 The Renaissance of New England 

letters were finally opening to New England knowledge. 
With all his contemporaries he revelled in this new world 
of human record and expression. To the very end he 
never lost a consequent, exuberantly boyish trick of 
dragging in allusions to all sorts of personages and matters 
familiar to him only by name. Take a sentence at 
random from his essay on " Self-Rehance: " "Pythagoras 
was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, 
and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton." These 
great names he mentions with all the easy assurance 
of intimacy; he could hardly speak more familiarly of 
seven Concord farmers idling in a row on some sunny 
bench. Turn to him anywhere, and in any dozen pages 
you will find allusions as complacent as these, and about 
as accidental, to the bewildcringly various names at which 
his encyclopedia chanced to open. He had, in short, all 
the juvenile pedantry of renascent New England at a mo- 
ment when Yankees had begun to know the whole range 
of literature by name, and when they did not yet distinguish 
between such knowledge and the unpretentious mastery 
of scholarship. 

It is now over twenty years since Emerson's life 
gently faded away, and it is a full sixty since his eager 
preaching or prophecy of individualistic ideahsm stirred 
renascent New England to its depths. We have been 
trying to guess what Emerson may mean in permanent 
literature. To understand what he means historically, 
we must remind ourselves again of the conditions which 
surrounded his maturity. When he came to the pulpit 
of the Second Church of Boston, the tyranny of custom, 
at least in theoretical matters, was little crushed. Heretical 
though Unitarianism was, it remained in outward form a 



Ralph Waldo Emerson ^^^ 

dominant religion. Statesmanship and scholarship, too, 
were ecjually tixed and rigid; and so, to a degree hardly 
conceivable to-day, was the structure of society. Even 
to-day untrammelled freedom of thought, unrestrained 
assertion of individual belief, sometimes demands grave 
self-sacrifice. In Emerson's day it demanded heroic 
spirit. 

To say that Emerson's lifelong heroism won us what 
moral and intellectual freedom we now possess would be 
to confuse the man with the movement in which he is the 
greatest figure. As the years pass, however, we begin to 
understand that no other American writings record that 
movement half so vitally as his. We may not care for 
some of the things he said; we may not find sympathetic 
the temper in which he uttered them; but we cannot deny 
that when, for two hundred years, intellectual tyranny had 
kept the native American mind cramped within the limits 
of tradition, Emerson fearlessly stood forth as the chief His 
representative of that movement which asserted the right ^°"''^^^- 
of every individual to think, to feel, to speak, to act for 
himself, confident that so far as each acts in sincerity good 
shall ensue. 

To many he still remains preeminently "the friend and 
aider of those who would live in the spirit." And indeed, 
whoever believes in individualism must always respect in 
Emerson a living prophet. Just as surely, those who be- 
lieve in obedience to authority must always lament the 
defection from their ranks of a spirit which, whatever its 
errors, even they must admit to have been brave, honest, 
serene, and essentially pure with all that purity which is 
the deepest grace of ancestral New England. 



VII 

THE LESSER MEN OF CONCORD 

References 
bronson alcott 
Works: There is no collected edition of Alcott's works, which were 
published by Roberts Brothers, Boston. For a list of them, see Foley. 

Biography and Criticism: F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris, Memoir, 
2 vols., Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893. 
Bibliography: Foley, 3. 
Selections: Stedman, 77-79; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 17-22. 

THOREAU 

Works: Works, Riverside Edition, it vols., Boston: Houghton, i8qg- 
1900. 

Biography and Criticism: F. B. Sanborn, Henry David Thoreau, 
Boston: Houghton, 1882 (aml); H. S. Salt, Life of Henry David Thoreau, 
London: Scott, 1896 (gw); Lowell, "Thoreau," in Lowell's Works 
Riverside Edition, L 361 ff; Emerson, "Thoreau," in Emerson's Works, 
Riverside Edition, X, 421 ff; Stevenson, "Thoreau," in Stevenson's 
Works, Thistle Edition, XIV, 116 flF. 

Bibliography: Foley, 291-292; Salt, r/jorpaw, pp. i-x (at the end); 
S. A. Jones, Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau, New York: Pri- 
vately printed, 1894. 

Selections: *Carpenter, 343-357; Duyckinck, II, 655-656; Sted- 
man, 182-183; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 323-336. 

Concord, Massachusetts, until Emerson's time cele- 
brated as the place where the embattled farmers made their 
stand against the British regulars in 1775, is now even 
better known as the Yankee village where for half a cen- 
tury Emerson lived, and gathered about him a little group 
of the intellectually and spiritually enlightened. Of the 

266 



Lesser Men of Concord 



267 



men who flourished in Emerson's Concord, the most emi- 
nent was Hawthorne, whose work belongs not to philoso- 
phy, but to pure letters, and whom we shall consider later. 
He would hardly have expected a place among the prophets 
of the eternities. At least two other Concord men, though, 
would have been disposed to call themselves philosophers, 
and, with artless lack of humor, to expect immortality in 
company with Emerson and Plato 
and the rest. These were Amos 
Bronson Alcott (1799- 1888) 
and Henry David Thoreau 
(1817-1862). 

Alcott was four years older than 
Emerson. The son of a Connecti- 
cut farmer, he began life as a 
peddler, in which character he 
sometimes strayed a good way 
southward. A thoroughly honest 
man of unusually active mind, his 
chief emotional trait appears to 
have been a self-esteem which he never found reason to Aicott. 
abate. In the midst of peddhng, he felt himself divinely 
commissioned to reform mankind. He soon decided that 
his reform ought to begin with education. As early as 1823, 
having succeeded in educating himself in a manner which 
he found satisfactory, he opened a school at his native town, 
Wolcott, Connecticut. Five years later he removed to Bos- 
ton, where he announced that if people would send him 
their children, he would educate them as children had never 
been educated before. That he kept this promise no one 
will doubt after reading the two volumes of Conversations 
with Children on the Gospels (i 836-1837), which show Al- 




268 The Renaissance of New England 

cott's strange method of teaching the poor httle Boston 
children by asking them questions about the soul and the 
eternities, and by punishing the good children when the 
bad children misbehaved.* 

Before many years his school came to an end. Mr. 
Alcott then became a professional philosopher, lecturing, 
writing, and failing to support his family in decent com- 
fort. When the Dial was started, he contributed to it his 
"Orphic Sayings." The fountain of these was inex- 
haustible; and even Margaret Fuller had practical sense 
enough to inform him with regret that she could not 
afford to till the Dial with matter, however valuable, from 
a single contributor. His reply was characteristic; he 
loftil}' regretted that the Dial was no longer an organ of 
free speech. In 1842 he visited England, where certain 
people of a radical turn received him with a seriousness 
which he found gratifying. Returning to America, he 
endeavored to establish at Harvard, Massachusetts, a com- 
munity called Fruitlands, something like the contemporary 
Brook Farm. Before long Fruitlands naturally collapsed. 
For most of his ensuing life, he lived in Concord. 

There is an aspect, no doubt, in which such a life seems 
the acme of perverse selfishness; but this is far from the 
whole story. The man's weakness, as well as his strength, 
lay in a self-esteem so inordinate that it crowded out of his 
possibilities any approach either to good sense or to the 
saving grace of humor. On the other hand, he was honest, 
he was sincere, he was devoted to idealism, and he attached 
to his perceptions, opinions, and utterances an importance 
which those who found him sympathetic were occasionally 

* See also EUzabetli Palmer Peabody's Record of a School: Exempli- 
fying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (1835). 



Lesser 31 en of Concord 



269 



inclined to share. Of his published writings none was 
remembered, unless by his immediate friends, a year after 
he died. In life the man was a friend of Emerson's, 
holding in the town of Concord a position which he prob- 
ably believed as eminent as Emerson's own. Now he 
seems the extreme type of what Yankee idealism could 
come to when unchecked by humor or common-sense. 

If Alcott is rapidly being forgotten, the case is different 
with Thoreau. For whatever the 
quahty of Thoreau's philosophy, 
the man was in his own way a 
literary artist of unusual merit. 
He was born of a Connecticut 
family not long emigrated from 
France. On his mother's side he 
had Yankee blood. What little 
record remains of his kin would 
seem to show that, like many New 
England folks of the farming class, 
they had a kind of doggedly self- 
assertive temper which inclined 
them "to habits of personal isola- 
tion. Thoreau graduated at Harvard College in 1837. 
While a student he gained some little distinction as a 
writer of English ; his compositions, though commonplace 
in substance, are sensitive in form. After graduation, he 
lived mostly at Concord. Though not of pure Yankee 
descent, he had true Yankee versatility; he was a tolera- 
ble farmer, a good surveyor, and a skilful maker of lead- 
pencils. In one way or another he was thus able by the 
work of comparatively few weeks in the year to provide 
the simple necessities of his vegetarian life. So he early 




^2^>>^ ^^.^ii^^c^. 



Thoreau. 



270 The Renaissance of New England 

determined to work no more than was needful for self- 
support, and to spend the rest of his time in high 
thinking. 

In the general course which his thinking and conduct 
took, one feels a trace of his French origin. Human 
beings, the French philosophy of the eighteenth century 
had strenuously held, are born good; evil could spring 
only from the distorting influences of society. Accepted 
by the earlier Transcendentalists, this line of thought 
had led to such experimental communities as Brook 
Farm and the still more fleeting Fruitlands. Thoreau 
was Frenchman enough to reason out individuahsm to 
its logical extreme. The reform of society must be ac- 
complished, if at all, by the reform of the individuals who 
compose it. Communities, after all, are only miniature 
societies, wherein must lurk all the germs of social evil. 
Let individuals look to themselves, then; under no other 
circumstances can human nature freely develop its in- 
herent excellence. So for twenty-five years Thoreau, 
living at Concord, steadily tried to keep himself free from 
complications with other people. Incidentally, he had 
the good sense not to marry; and as nobody was depend- 
ent on him for support, his method of life could do no 
harm. 
Contrast Thorcau meant to be a philosopher, illustrating his 

EmersTn philosophy from what he saw about Walden Pond, or on 
and Cape Cod, or in the Maine woods, just as Emerson drew 

his illustrations from Plato, the Bible, Saadi, or Plutarch. 
Now with Emerson, although the illustrations were often 
not original and usually were chosen haphazard, the prin- 
ciple, as we have seen, was apt to be of permanent value 
for its lesson of faith and courage. Later generations, 



Lesser Men of Concord 271 

therefore, have remembered Emerson's lessons of self- 
rehance and the like, and have forgotten any criticisms 
which, by way of illustration, he may have passed upon 
Napoleon, or Buddah, or Shakspere. With Thoreau the 
case is exactly the opposite. People have come to think 
that Thoreau's philosophy was often crabbed, far-fetched, 
and unoriginal. But they have also found that he illus- 
trated his philosophy with eyes which for seeing ponds, 
and leaves, and birds, were the very best of his time. So 
they have very sensibly forgotten Thoreau as a philos- 
opher, and have kept him in mind as a loving observer of 
Nature. To take a case in point: Thoreau's best known 
experiment was his residence for about two years in the 
woods near Concord, where he built himself a little cabin, 
supported himself by cultivating land enough to provide 
for his immediate wants, and devoted his leisure to philo- 
sophic thought. The fruit of this experiment was his 
best known book, Walden (1854). To Thoreau himself 
Walden was chiefly important because it tried to prove waiden. 
something. "I went to the woods," he says, "because 
I wished to Hve deUberately, to front only the essential 
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to 
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had 
not lived." Nowadays, however, we care much less 
for what Walden tries to prove than for what its author 
heard and saw near Walden Pond. 

Nature, as every one knows, had been a favorite theme 
of that romantic revival in England whose leader was 
Wordsworth. In one aspect, Thoreau's writing might ac- 
cordingly seem little more than an American evidence of a 
temper which had declared itself in the old world a gen- 
eration before. Nothing, however, can alter the fact that 



272 The Renaissance of New England 

the Nature he delighted in was characteristically American. 
First of all men, Thoreau brought that revolutionary 
temper which recoils from the artiticialities of civilization 
face to face with the rugged fields, the pine woods and the 
apple orchards, the lonely ponds and the crystalline skies 
of eastern New England. His travels occasionally ranged 
so far as the Merrimac River, Cape Cod, or even beyond 
Maine into Canada; but pleasant as the books are in 
which he recorded these wanderings,* we could spare 
them far better than Waldcn, or than the journalsf in 
which for years he set down his daily observations in the 
single town of Concord. Thoreau's individuality is often 
so assertive as to repel a sympathy which it happens not 
instantly to attract; but that sympathy must be unwhole- 
somely sluggish which would willingly resist the appeal of 
his communion with Nature. If your lot be ever cast 
in some remote region of our simple country, he can do 
you, when you will, a rare service, stimulating your eye to 
see, and your ear to hear, in all the little commonplaces 
about you, those endlessly changing details which make 
life everywhere so wondrous. 

Nor is Thoreau's vitality in literature a matter only of 
his observation. Open his works almost anywhere — there 
are eleven volumes of them now — and even in the philo- 
sophic passages you will find loving precision of touch. He 
was no immortal maker of phrases. Amid bewildering ob- 
scurities, Emerson now and again flashed out utterances 
which may last as long as our language. Thoreau had 

*A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849; The Maine 
Woods, 1864; Cape Cod, 1865, A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery 
and Reform Papers, 1866. 

'f Early Spring in Massachusetts, etc., ed. H. G. O. Blake, 1881; 
Summer, 1884; Winter, 1888; Autumn, 1892 



Lesser Men of Concord 273 

no such power; but he did possess in higher degree than 
Emerson himself the power of making sentences and para- 
graphs artistically beautiful. Read him aloud, and you 
will find in his work a trait like that which we remarked 
in the cadences of Brockden Brown and of Poe; the 
emphasis of your voice is bound to fall where meaning 
demands. An effect like this is attainable only through 
delicate sensitiveness to rhythm. So when you come to 
Thoreau's pictures of Nature, you have an almost inex- 
haustible series of verbal sketches in which every touch 
has the grace of precision. On a large scale, to be sure, 
his composition falls to pieces; he never troubled himself 
about a systematically made book, or even a systematic 
chapter. In mere choice of words, too, he is generally 
so simple as to seem almost commonplace. But his sen- 
tences and paragraphs are often models of art so fine as to 
seem artless. 

With Thoreau's philosophy, as we have seen, the case 
is different. Among Emerson's chief traits was the fact 
that when he scrutinized the eternities in search of ideal 
truth, his whole energy was devoted to the act of scrutiny. 
Perhaps, like Emerson, Thoreau had the true gift of vision; Summary, 
but surely he could never report his visions in terms which 
suffer us to forget himself. The glass which he offers to 
our eyes is always tinctured with his own disturbing in- 
dividuahty. In spite of the fact that Thoreau was a 
more conscientious artist than Emerson, this constant 
obtrusion of his personality places him in a lower rank, 
just as surely as his loving sense of nature places him far 
above the half-foolish egotism of Bronson Alcott. More 
and more the emergence of Emerson from his surround- 
ings grows distinct. Like truly great men, whether he 



274 The Renaissance of New England 

was truly great or not, he possessed the gift of such com- 
mon-sense as saves men from the perversities of eccen- 
tricity. 

We have now followed the Renaissance of New Eng- 
land from its beginning in the fresh vitality of public utter- 
ances and scholarship, through the awakening optimism 
of the Unitarians, to the disintegrant vagaries of the Tran- 
scendentalists. We have seen how, as this impulse pro- 
ceeded, it tended to assume forms which might reason- 
ably alarm people of sagely conservative habit. Reform 
in some respects is essentially destructive; and the en- 
thusiasm of Yankee reformers early showed symptoms 
of concentration in a shape which ultimately became 
destructive to a whole system of society. This, which 
enlisted at least the sympathies of almost every Tran- 
scendentalist — which was warmly advocated by Channing 
himself, which stirred Emerson to fervid utterances con- 
cerning actual facts, and which inspired some of the 
latest and most ardent writings of Thoreau — was the 
philanthropic movement for the abolition of negro 
slavery in our Southern States. 



VIII 

THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 

References 
General Authorities: J. F. Clarke, "The Antislavery Movement 
in Boston, " Winsor's Memorial History of Boston, III, Chapter vi; T. W. 
Higginson, Contemporaries, Boston: Houghton, iSog. For further refer- 
ences, see Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 187 ff. 

garrison 

Works: Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd 
Garrison, Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1852. 

Biography and Criticism: Lije by W. P. Garrison and F. J. Garrison, 
4 vols., New York: Century Co., 1885-1889. 

Bibliography: Channing and Hart, Guide, § 187. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 126; Stedman, 102; 
*Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 222-230. 

PARKER 

Works: Works, 14 vols., London: Triibner, 1863-1865; Speeches^ 
Addresses and Occasional Sermons, 2 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 
1852. 

Biography and Criticism: John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of 
Theodore Parker, 2 vols., New York: Appleton, 1864; J. W. Chadwick, 
Tluodore Parker, Boston: Houghton, 1900. 

Bibliography: As for Garrison. 

Selections: Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 514-520. 

PHILLIPS 

Works: Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 2 vols., Boston: Lee & Shep- 
ard, 1863-1892. 

Biography and Criticism: G. L. Austin, Life and Times of Wendell 
Phillips, Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1888. 

Bibliography: As for Garrison. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 102; Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, VII, 60-68. • 

275 



276 The Renaissance of New England 



Enthu- 
siasm for 
Reform 
Inherent in 
Unitarian- 
ism and 
Transcen- 
dentalism. 



SUMNER 

Works: Works, 15 vols., Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1870-1883. 

Biography and Criticism: E. L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of 
Charles Sumner, 4 vols., Boston: Roberts, 1877-1893; Moorfield Storey, 
Charles Sumner, Boston: Houghton, 1899 (as); Rhodes, History of the 
United States, II, Chapter vii. 

Bibliography: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 202, 211. 

Selections: Hart, Contemporaries, IV, Nos. 146, 174; Stedman and 
Hutchinson, VII, 68-78. 

MRS. STOWE 

Works: Works, Riverside Edition, 16 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1896. 

Biography and Criticism: Mrs. J. T. Fields, The Life 0} Harriet 
Beecher Stowe, Boston: Houghton, 1897. 

Selections: Carpenter, 312-322; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 24; 
Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 132-155. 

LINCOLN 

Works: Complete Works, ed. J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 2 vols., 
New York: Century Co., 1894; Passages from [Lincoln's] Speeches and 
Letters, New York: Century Co., 1901. 

Biography and Criticism: Life, by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 10 
vols., New York: Century Co., 1890; J. T. Morse, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, 
2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1893 (as). 

Bibliography: Channing and Hart, Guide, especially § 208. 

Selections: Carpenter, 260-267; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, Nos. 44, 
66, ici, 127, 145; Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 470-485. 

Enthusiasm for reform was obviously involved in the 
conception of human nature which underlay the world- 
wide revolutionary movement whose New England mani- 
festation took the forms of Unitarianism and Transcen- 
dentalism. If human nature is essentially good, if evil is 
merely the consequence of what modern evolutionists 
might call artificial environment, it follows that relaxation 
of environment, releasing men from temporary bond- 
age, must change things for the better. The heyday of 
Transcendentalism consequently had a humorous super- 
ficial aspect, admirably descriljed in Lowell's essay on 



The Antislavery Movement 277 

Thoreau (1865). "A sudden mental and moral mutiny," 
he calls it, in which "every possible form of intel- 
lectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel." 
So long as reform remains in this stage, it can hardly im- 
press people of common-sense as worse than ridiculous. 
When reform becomes militant, however, trouble heaves 
in sight; and the militant shape which New England re- 
form took in the '40s clearly involved not only a social 
revolution, but an unprecedented attack on that general 
right of property which the Common Law had always 
defended. 

Negro slavery, at one time common to ail the English- Early 
speaking colonies, had died out in the Northern States, to^siavery! 
During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, mean- 
while, the condition of industry in the South had tended 
to stimulate the institution in that region until it assumed 
unforeseen social and economic im[)ortancc. Througliout 
colonial history there had been considerable theoretical 
objection to slavery.* Samuel Sewall opposed it; so from 
the beginning did the Quakers; and even in the South itself 
there were plenty of people who saw its evils and hoped 
for its disappearance. But no thoroughly organized move- 
ment against it took place until the air of New England 
freshened with the spirit of Renaissance. 

Channing, who passed the years from 1798 to 1800 in 
Richmond, wrote from there: 

"Master and slave! Nature never made such a distinction, or 
established such a relation. Man, when forced to substitute the will 
of another for his own, ceases to be a moral agent; his title to the name 
of man is extinguished, he becomes a mere machine in the hands of 

* Consult the references under "Slavery" in Stedman and Hutchin- 
son's Library of American Literature, Vol. XI. 



278 The Renaissance of New England 



his oppressor. The influence of slavery on the whites is almost as 
fatal as on the blacks themselves." 

To Channing the conclusion here stated was unavoid- 
able. If human beings are essentially good, they have a 
natural right to free development. No form of environ- 
ment could more impede such development than lifelong 
slavery. So slavery confronted honest beUevers in human 
excellence with a dilemma. Either 
this thing was a monstrous denial 
of fundamental truth, or else the 
negroes were not human. Some- 
thing like the latter view was cer- 
tainly held by many good people. 
In the South, indeed, it became 
almost axiomatic. To most phil- 
anthropic Northern people in 
1830, on the other hand, the dis- 
tinction between Caucasians and 
Africans seemed literally a ques- 
tion of complexion. Men they 
believed to be incarnate souls ; and 
the color which a soul happened to assume they held a 
mere accident.* 

Accordingly, a full nine years before the foundation of 
the Dial, there was unflinchingly established in Boston a 
newspaper, which until the close of the Civil War remained 
the official organ of the New England antislavery men. 
This was the Liberator, founded in 1831 by William 
Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879). Born of the poorer 
classes at Newburyport, by trade a printer, by tempera- 

* This is compactly shown in the phrasing of the title of Lydia Maria 
Child's Appeal in Favor of that Class o} Americans called Africans (1833). 




The Antislavery Movement 279 

ment an uncompromising reformer, he was stirred from 
youth by a deep conviction that slavery must be up- 
rooted. When he founded the Liberator, he had already 
made himself conspicuous; but the educated classes 
thought him insignificant. In 1833 he was a principal 
founder of the Antislavery Society in Philadelphia. From 
that time, the movement strengthened. Garrison died 
in 1879. -Por the last fifteen years of his life he was held, 
as he is held by tradition, a great national hero, a man 
who stood for positive right, who won his cause, who 
deserves unquestioning admiration, and whose opponents 
merit equally unquestioning contempt. 

So complete a victory has rarely been the lot of any 
earthly reformer, and there are aspects in which Garrison 
deserves all the admiration accorded to his memory. Fa- 
natical, of course, he was absolutely sincere in his fanati- 
cism, absolutely devoted and absolutely brave. What is 
more, he is to be distinguished from most Americans who 
in his earlier days had attained eminence and influence by 
the fact that he never had such educational training as 
should enable him to see more than one side of a question. 
The greatest strength of an honest, uneducated reformer 
lies in his unquestioning singleness of view. He really 
beheves those who oppose him to be as wicked as he be- 
lieves himself to be good. What moral strength is in- 
herent in blind conviction is surely and honorably his. 

But because Garrison was honest, brave, and strenuous, The Con- 
and because long before his life closed, the movement to op7nTon* 
which he unreservedly gave his energy proved triumphant, 
it does not follow that the men who opposed him were 
wicked. To understand the temper of the conservative 
people of New England we must stop for a moment, and 



280 The Renaissance of New England 

see how slavery presented itself to them during the years 
of the antislavery struggle. 

In the first place, the institution of slavery was honestly 
regarded by many people as one phase of the more com- 
prehensive institution which really lies at the basis of 
modern civilization — namely, property. The conviction 
that slavery, whatever its evils, was really a form of 
property, and that an attack on slavery therefore in- 
volved a general attack on civilization, was one of the 
strongest convictions of conservative New England. 

Again, in many minds which abhorred the evils of 
slavery, this conviction was strengthened by an equally 
honest one that when you have made a bargain you should 
stick to it. The Constitution of the United States was 
presenting itself more and more in the light of an agree- 
ment between two incompatible sets of economic insti- 
tutions, assuring to each the right freely to exist within 
its own limits. Among the conservative classes of New 
England the antislavery movement accordingly seemed as 
threatening to the Union as to property itself. Whatever 
threatened Union or property, they conceived, clearly 
threatened civilization. 

A third consideration, also, had great weight among 
thoughtful people: antislavery agitation, they believed, 
would greatly increase the danger of savage insurrection, 
the mere fear of which kept Southern people, especially 
Southern women, in constant terror.* 

When at last the antislavery movement began to gather 
disturbing force, this conservative opposition to it was 
therefore as violent, as sincere, as deep, and in many as- 
pects as admirable, as was the movement itself. But the 

* See Rhodes, History of Ike Uniled States, I, 376-377. 



The Antislaveri) Movement 281 

fact that the conservative temper of New England was 
not, as some antislavery men asserted, wicked, in no way 
involves what conservative New England passionately 
proclaimed — namely, wickedness on the part of the anti- 
slavery men themselves. The truth is that an irrepressi- 
ble social conflict was at hand, and that both sides were 
as honorable as were both sides during the American 
Revolution, or during the civil wars of England. The 
earlier phases of the antislavery movement produced no 
pure literature; but they did excite the most characteristic 
utterances of at least three orators who are still remem- 
bered. 

The one of these who most clearly marks the relation Parker, 
of the antislavery movement to Unitarianism and Tran- 
scendeijtalism was the Reverend Theodore Parker 
(1810-1860). Born of country folk at Lexington, Massa- 
chusetts, he studied at Harvard in 1830-1, and in 1837 he 
became a Unitarian minister. In the history of Unita- 
rianism he has a prominent place ; in the history of Tran- 
scendentalism, too, for his writings are among the most 
vigorous and specific in the Dial, to which he was a con- 
stant contributor; but his most solid strength lay in his 
scholarship. There have been few men in New England 
whose learning has equalled his in range and in vitality. 
The manner in which his ardent nature impelled him to 
express himself, however, was so far from what is gen- 
erally characteristic of scholars that in popular memory 
his scholarship has almost been forgotten. As a Uni- 
tarian minister, Parker is remembered mostly for having 
carried individual preaching to its most unflinching con- 
clusions. As a Transcendentahst, Parker's enthusiastic 
and active temperament made him far more reformer than 



282 The Renaissance of New England 

philosopher. He was content to let others pry into the 
secrets of the eternities. What chiefly interested him were 
the lines of conduct which men ought to follow in view of 
the new floods of light; and among these lines of con- 
duct none seemed to him so important as that which should 
lead straightest to the abolition of slavery. He never 
lived to see his passionate purpose accomphshed. Intense 
activity broke down his health; he died and was buried 
at Florence, whither he had gone for recuperation. 

Among his virtues and graces was not that of sympathy 
with opponents; and when it came to pubhc utterances 
on the subject of abohtion he indulged himself in a free- 
dom of personal attack which, after the lapse of half a 
century, seems extreme. For this might be pleaded 
the excuse that Theodore Parker, like Garrison, sprang 
from that uneducated class which is apt to see only 
one side of any stirring question. No such excuse may 
be pleaded for the personal acrimony of those two other 
antislavery orators who are best remembered — Wendell 
Phillips (1811-1884) and Charles Sumner (1811-1874). 
Phillips. Phillips bore a distinguished name. Kinsmen of his 

had founded the academies of Exeter and Andover, and 
his father had been the first Mayor of the city of Boston 
at a time when political power there still resided in 
the hands of a few leading families. He graduated at 
Harvard College in 1831, and in 1834 he was admitted to 
the bar. A man of extremely active and combative tem- 
perament, he sincerely wished to practise his profession; 
but for the next two or three years he found few clients. 
Just at this time a meeting was held in Faneuil Hall, 
where among other speakers the Attorney- General of 
Massachusetts defended the action of a western mob in 



The Antislavery Movement 283 

taking the life of Lovejoy, a very outspoken Abolitionist. 
Phillips was in the audience; he interrupted the speaker, 
made his way to the platform, and then and there delivered 
an antislavery outburst which carried the audience by 
storm. So, having pubhcly declared war against conserv- 
atism by passionately inciting a public meeting to dis- 
regard the authority of that class to which he himself 
hereditarily belonged, he embarked on a lifelong career of 
agitation. 

Throughout, his oratory was highly finished. A man of 
distinguished personal appearance, with all the grace and 
formal restraint of hereditary breeding, he had mastered, 
to a rare degree, the subtle art of first winning the sym- 
pathy of audiences, and then leading them, for the moment 
unresisting, to points where, on waking from his spell, they 
were astonished to find themselves. Many people, par- 
ticularly of the less educated sort, ended by yielding them- 
selves to his power. Others, of a more thoughtful habit, 
often felt that in fact this power was only the consummate 
adroitness of a man so impatient of rivalry as recklessly to 
indulge his inordinate passion for momentary dominance. 
His speeches were true speeches. In print, lacking the 
magic of his delivery, they are like the words of songs which 
for lyric excellence need the melodies to which they have 
once been wedded. As the years pass, admiration for his 
great effectiveness of speech is often qualified by suspicion 
that, with the light which was his, he should have refrained 
from such reckless denunciation of established order. 

Like Phillips, the other Bostonian orator whose name is Sumner, 
associated with the antislavery movement sacrificed his 
social comfort to his principles. Charles Sumner was bom 
of a good family at Boston ; he graduated at Harvard ; he 



284 The Renaissance of New England 



Mrs. 
Stowe. 



became a lawyer; and before the age of thirty he had spent 
three years in Europe, where he made permanent friend- 
ships with many notable people. A man of cultivated 
taste, he appears at his best in the records of his lifelong 
intimacy with the poet Longfellow. Like Phillips's, his 
career began as one which might have been expected 
to carry on the old traditions of the cultivated classes of 
New England ; but he early found 
himself stirred by his fervent belief 
in the moral wrong of slavery. 
Sumner's devotion to principle is 
uncjuestioned. The violence with 
which lie permitted himself to 
abuse those who did not share his 
opinions, on the other hand, dis- 
figures many of his speeches. Of 
these speeches, collected in fifteen 
good-sized volumes, perhaps the 
most famous is "The Crime 
against Kansas," delivered in the 
United States Senate Chamber on the 19th and 20th of 
May, 1856. 

These antislavery men did some of their chief work 
when the cause they advocated seemed far from public 
favor. We come now^ to a book produced by the anti- 
slavery movement, which suddenly proved that movement 
popular. This was Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's (181 2 
-i8g6) Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, the year 
after Sumner had entered the Senate from Massachusetts, 
and two years after Webster's Seventh of March Speech. 

Harriet Beecher, in literature the most distinguished of 
her family, was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, where her 




The Antislavery Movement 285 

father, Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), was settled as a Con- 
gregational minister. In 1832 her father removed from 
Boston to Cincinnati, where for twenty years he was the 
president of a theological seminary. Here, in 1836, Har- 
riet Beecher married the Reverend Calvin Stowe, who, 
like herself, had ardent antislavery sympathies. In 
ordinary domestic duties Mrs. Stowe had more to do than 
most women; but her activity was such that throughout 
her busiest days her mind was constantly though not 
systematically occupied with the reform which she did so 
much to further. Living for years just on the borderland 
of the slave States and the free, she acc^uired a personal 
familiarity with slavery shared by few Northern people; 
and at odd* times she was constantly practising her pen. 
In 1850, the year of Webster's Seventh of March Speech, 
her husband was appointed a professor at Bowdoin 
College, Brunswick, Maine. Here, in 1851 and 1852, 
Mrs. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the object of which 
was to set forth in concrete form the actual horrors of 
slavery. At first little noticed, this book rapidly attracted 
popular attention. During the next five years above half 
a million copies were sold in the United States alone; and 
it is hardly excessive to say that wherever Uncle Tom's 
Cabin went, public conscience was aroused.* 

Written carelessly, and full of crudities, Uncle Tom's uncie 
Cabin, even after fifty years, remains a remarkable piece ^^^J 
of fiction. The truth is, that almost unawares Mrs. 
Stowe had in her the stuff of which good novelists are 
made. Her plot, to be sure, is conventional and rambling; 
but her characters, even though little studied in detail, 
have a vitality which no study can achieve; we unhesi- 

*See Rhodes, I, 278-285. 



286 The Renaissance of New England 

tatingly accept them as real. Her descriptive power, 
meanwhile, was such as to make equally real the back- 
grounds in which her action and her characters move. 
What is more, these backgrounds, most of which she knew 
from personal experience, are probably so faithful to actual 
nature that the local sentiment aroused as you read them 
may generally be accepted as true. And though Mrs. 
Stowe's book was written in spare moments, amid the 
distractions of housekeeping and of a growing family, her 
careless style is often strong and vivid. 

Should any one doubt Mrs. Stowe's power as a writer, 
remembering only that in Uncle Tom's Cabin she achieved 
a great popular success, partly caused by the changing 
public opinion of her day, we need only glance at some of 
her later work to make sure that she had in her a power 
which, if circumstances had permitted its development, 
might have given her a distinguished place in English 
oidtown fiction. Her best book is probably Oldtown Folks 
(1869). Like all her work, this rambling story of life near 
Boston about the beginning of the nineteenth century is 
careless in detail and very uneven. As you consider it, 
however, you grow to feel that above almost any other 
book Oldtown Folks sets forth the circumstances and the 
temper of the native Yankee people. What is more, the 
careful passages — the opening chapters, for example — are 
admirably written. In brief, Mrs. Stowe differed from 
most American novelists in possessing a spark of genius. 
Had this genius pervaded her work, she might have been 
a figure of lasting literary importance. 

Even as it was, she had power enough to make Uncle 
Tom's Cabin the most potent literary force of the anti- 
slavery days. She differed from most Abolitionists in 



Folks. 



The Antislavcry Movement 287 

having observed on the spot all the tragic evils of slavery. 
Until the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, slavery had 
on the whole presented itself to the North as a deplorable 
abstraction. Wherever the book went, it awakened this 
abstraction into life, much as powerful preaching some- 
times awakens a dormant sentiment of religion. Of 
course, Uttcle Tom's Cabin is partisan, but it is honestly 
so; there can be no doubt that Mrs. Stowe believed her 
negroes as true to life as later, and rightly, she believed 
the Yankees of Oldtown Folks. Whatever you may 
think of Uncle Tom's Cabin, you can never truly feel 
it to have been instigated by a demagogic purpose. 
Mrs. Stowe's purpose was honestly to state appalling 
truth. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin was pubHshed in 1852. To its un- 
precedented popularity may perhaps be traced the final 
turn of the public tide. Within ten years the conflict be- 
tween the slave States and the free reached the inevitable 
point of civil war. The ist of January, 1863, saw that 
final proclamation of emancipation which, by confiscating, 
as virtually contraband property, all slaves in the States 
which were then in arms against the Federal government, 
practically achieved the end for which the antislavery men 
had unfalteringly striven. 

We can hardly speak of the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln. 
without touching for a moment upon the greatest name in 
American history of the nineteenth century. Abraham 
Lincoln (1809-1865) proved himself in the Lincoln- 
Douglas campaign such a master of debate, and in his 
inaugural addresses and in the famous Gettysburg speech 
such a master of simple and powerfully eloquent English, 
that, aside from his great political services, any account 



288 The Renaissance of New England 

of American oratory or of antislavery would be incomplete 
without some mention of him. But Lincoln's historical 
importance is so great that any discussion of him would 
lead us far afield. And our concern now is with New 
England. 



IX 

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

References 

Works: Riverside Edition, 7 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1888; Poems, 
Cambridge Edition, i vol., Boston: Houghton, 1894. 

Biography and Criticism: *S. T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John 
Greenleaj Whittier, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1894; W. J. Linton, Life 
of John Greenleaf Whittier, London: Scott, 1893 (gw); T. W. Higginson, 
John Greenleaf Whittier, New York: Macmillan, 1902 (eml); G. R. Car- 
penter, John Greenleaf Whittier, Boston: Houghton, 1903 (aml); Wen- 
dell, Stelligeri, New York: Scribner, 1893, pp. 149-201; *Stedman, 
Poets of America, Chapter iv. 

Bibliography: Linton's Wliitticr, pp. i-viii (at end); Foley, 310-320. 

Selections: Duyckinck, H, 473-476; Griswold, Poets, 390-406; 
Hart, Contemporaries, IV, Nos. 21, 125; Stedman, 128-142; *Stedman 
and Hutchinson, VI, 353-389. 

Among the antislavery leaders of Massachusetts was 
one who, with the passing of time, seems more and more 
distinguished as a man of letters. John Greenleaf 
Whittier (1807-1892), born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, 
came of sound country stock, remarkable only because for 
several generations the family had been Quakers. The 
first New England manifestations of Quakerism, in the 
seventeenth century, had taken an extravagantly fanatical 
form, which resulted in tragedies still familiar to tradition. 
As the Friends of New England had settled down into 
peaceful observance of their own principles, however, let- 
ting alone the affairs of others, they had become an incon- 
spicuous, inoffensive body, neglected by the surrounding 
orthodoxy. Theologically, they beUeved in God, Jesus 

289 



Quaker 

Faith 



290 The Renaissance of New England 

Christ, and the Bible. The interpreter of the divine word 
they found not in any estabhshed church nor in any offi- 
cially sanctified order of ministers, but in the still, small 
voice given to mankind by the Heavenly Father. 
The In this faith there is clearly involved a conclusion at 

odds with Calvinism. To Quakers, inasmuch as every 
man possesses within himself the power of seeing the inner 
light and of hearing the still, small voice of God, all men 
are necessarily equal. So, when the antislavery move- 
ment began, Whittier, a lifelong adherent of this traditional 
faith, found himself in a relation to militant philanthropy 
very different from that of ancestral Calvinists. These, 
lately emancipated by the new life of Unitarianism and 
Transcendentalism, came to the reform with all the hotness 
of head which marks converts. Whittier, on the other 
hand, had inherited the principles to which the men with 
whom he alhed himself had been converted; and so, al- 
though a lifelong and earnest reformer, he is remarkably 
free from virulence. Again, sprung from a class which 
made his childhood hterally that of a barefoot boy, and 
growing up in days when the New England country was 
still in the possession of an unmixed race whose capacity 
for self-government has never been surpassed, Whittier 
could unhesitatingly base not only on religious theory, 
but also on personal inexperience, his fervent faith in the 
equality of mankind. 

Whittier's youth was passed in the country. His edu- 
cation never went beyond country schools and two terms at 
the Haverhill Academy; but he had a natural love for 
literature. When he was nineteen years old, a poem of 
his was printed in the Newburyport Free Press, then edited 
by Garrison. At twenty-one he was already a professional 



Life. 



John Greenleaf Whittier 



291 



writer for country newspapers. At twenty-three he was 
editor of the Haverhill Gazelle. A year later he was made 
editor of a paper in Hartford, Connecticut; but his health, 
never robust, troubled him, and he returned to Massachu- 
setts. In 1 83 1 he published his first volume, a Httle book of 
verses called New England Leg- 
ends, and during the same year, 
that in which Garrison established 
the Liberator at Boston, h e 
became actively and ardently in- 
terested in the movement against 
slavery. Until 1840 this kept him 
constantly busy; in that year he 
resigned his charge of the Penn- 
sylvania Freeman, a journal 
devoted to the cause of abolition 
in Philadelphia. He removed to 
Amcsbury, Massachusetts, where 
he lived thenceforth. From 1826 
until the end, no year went by 
without his publishing poems, 
shy, and his later life uneventful. 

. Though Whittier was precocious, and his literary career 
extended over more than sixty-five years, he was not pro- 
lific. He never wrote much at a time, and he never wrote 
anything long. In the seven volumes of his collected 
works there are very few pieces which might not have been 
produced at a single sitting. Again, his work throughout 
these sixty-five years was far from varied in character. 
The limited circumstances of his life combined with lack 
of humor to make his writings seem often commonplace. 
What gives them merit are occasional passages where 




His temperament was 



Bound.' 



292 The Renaissance of New England 

simplicity emerges from commonplace into dignity and 
sometimes into passion. For half a century, Bryant re- 
mained correct and delicately sentimental; for longer still 
Whittier remained simple, sincere, and fervent. 
Snow- His masterpiece, if the word be not excessive, is " Snow- 

Bound," written when he was about fifty-seven years old. 
At that time, when most of his immediate family were 
dead, he tenderly recalled his memories of childhood. 
The vivid simphcity of his descriptions every one must 
feel; his picture of a winter evening at his old home, for 
example, almost appeals to the eye — 

"Shut in from all the world without, 
We sat the clean-winged hearth about, 
Content to let the north-wind roar 
In baffled rage at pane and door, 
While the red logs before us beat 
The frost line back with tropic heat; 
And ever, when a louder blast 
Shook beam and rafter as it passed, 
The merrier up its roaring draught 
The great throat of the chimney laughed; 
The house-dog on his paws outspread 
Lay to the fire his drowsy head, 
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall; 
And, for the winter fireside meet. 
Between the andiron's straddling feet, 
The mug of cider simmered slow. 
The apples sputtered in a row, 
And, close at hand, the basket stood 
With nuts from brown October's wood. " 

Nor is the merit of "Snow-Bound" merely descriptive. 
Throughout it you will find phrases which, except for mere 
lyric music, have a simple felicity almost final. Take the 



John Greenleaf Whittier 293 

couplet, for example, in which he speaks of his aunt, no 
longer young, who never married — 

"All unprofaned she held apart 
The virgin fancies of the heart." 

Or take the lines in which he remembers a sister, dead 
early in life — 

"And while in life's late afternoon, 
Where cool and long the shadows grow, 
I walk to meet the night that soon 
Shall shape and shadow overflow, 
I cannot feel that thou art far." 

Throughout "Snow-Bound" you may discover lines as 
excellent as these. 

Such vividness as distinguishes the descriptive passages New 
of "Snow-Bound" appears throughout Whittier's descrip- ^afure 
tive verse. Here, for example, are some lines from the 
"Prelude" which take one to the very heart of our drowsy 
New England summers : 

"Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold 
The tawny Incas for their gardens wrought, 
Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod, 
And the red pennons of the cardinal-flowers 
Hang motionless upon their upright staves. 
The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind, 
Wing-weary with its long flight from the South, 
Unfelt; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf 
With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams, 
Confesses it. The locust by the wall 
Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm. 
A single hay-cart down the dusty road 
Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep 
On the load's top. Against the neighboring hill, 



294 The Renaissance of New England 

Huddled along the stone wall's shady side, 
The sheep show white, as if a snowdrift still 
Defied the dog-star. Through the open door 
A drowsy smell of flowers^gray heliotrope, 
And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette — 
Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends 
To the pervading symphony of peace." 

At first sight perhaps commonplace, passages hke this 
as they grow famiHar prove more and more admirable 
in their simple truth. Of course they lack lyric beauty. 
Whittier's metrical range was very narrow, and his rhymes 
were often abominable. But whenever he dealt with the 
country he knew so well, he had an instinctive perception 
of those obvious facts which are really most characteristic, 
and within which are surely included its unobtrusive beauty 
and its slowly winning charm. With this excellent sim- 
plicity of perception he combined excellent simplicity of 
heart and phrase. 
Narrative In general, of course, the most popular literature is 
narrative. So Whittier's Yankee ballads often seem his 
most obvious works, — "Skipper Ireson's Ride," for ex- 
ample, or that artlessly sentimental " Maud Muller," where 
a New England judge is made to play the part of knight- 
errant of romance. Like his admirable poetry of Nature, 
these are simple and sincere. In sentiment, too, the first 
is fervid. Both in conception and in phrase, however, 
these, with all the rest we may let them stand for, are so 
commonplace that one finds critical admiration out of the 
question. 

Whittier's true claim to remembrance will rest on no 
such popularity as this, even though that popularity chance 
to be more' than momentary. In the first place, his simple 



Poems. 



John Greenleaf Whittier 295 

pictures of New England Nature are often excellent. In 
the second place, the fervor of his lifelong faith in the cause 
of human freedom sometimes breathed undying fire into 
verses which he made concerning the conflict with slavery. 
Another trait which he possessed is rare in tempera- 
ments eager for reform. This is magnanimity. It ap- 
pears nowhere more clearly than in almost the only de- 
parture from chronological order in the final collection 
of his works, which he himself arranged. Until 1850, 
Webster, whose devotion to the ideal of Union had com- 
})ellcd him to oppose every aggression of the South, had 
been held by the antislavery men an heroic leader. His 
Seventh of March Speech, which supported the Fugitive 
Slave Law, brought down on him a storm of antislavery 
indignation never expressed more fervently than in a poem 
by Whittier, still generally included in popular collections 
of American lyrics. He called this poem "Ichabod;" ichabod. 
and here are some of its verses — 

"So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn 
Which once he wore! 
The glory from his gray hairs gone 
Forevermore! 

"Let not the land once proud of him 
Insult him now, 
Nor brand with deeper shame the dim, 
Dishonored brow. 

"But let its humbled sons instead, 
From sea to lake, 
A long lament, as for the dead, 
In sadness make. 



Occasion. 



296 The Renaissance of New England 

"Then pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame; 
Walk backwards, with averted gaze, 
And hide the shame!" 

In 1850 no man condemned Webster more fiercely or 
more sincerely than Whittier. But two years after " Icha- 
bod " saw the light, Webster was dead; and it was nine 
before the Civil War broke out; and Whittier survived 
for almost thirty years longer. In 1880, reflecting on the 
past, he wrote about Webster again. This poem he 
The Lost called "The Lost Occasion," and in his collected works he 
put it directly after the "Ichabod" which he had so fer- 
vently written thirty years before. "The Lost Occasion" 
has generally been neglected by the makers of American 
anthologies, so "Ichabod" is traditionally supposed to 
express Whittier's final feeling about Daniel Webster, In 
this case tradition is unjust to both men. The single 
deviation from chronology in Whittier's collected works 
show^s that the poet desired his final sentiment concerning 
our greatest Whig statesman to be phrased in no lines 
denunciatory, but rather in such words as these — 

"Thou.shouldst have lived to feel below 
Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthron; 
The late-sprung mine that underlaid 
Thy sad concessions vainly made." 

^ 5(5 Jji Sji 5lS 5|J 

"No stronger voice than thine had then 
Called out the utmost might of men, 
To make the Union's charter free 
And strengthen law by liberty. 

Sj; Jft !jC ^ ij^ 5jS 

"Wise men and strong we did not lack; 
But still, with memory turning back, 



John Greenleaf Whittier 297 

In the dark hours we thought of thee, 
And thy lone grave beside the sea. 

"But, where thy native mountains bare 
Their foreheads to diviner air. 
Fit emblem of enduring fame, 
One lofty summit keeps thy name. 
***** "¥ 

Sunrise and sunset lay thereon 
With hands of light their benison. 
The stars of midnight pause to set 
Their jewels in its coronet. 
And evermore that mountain mass 
Seems climbing from the shadowy pass 
To light, as if to manifest 
Thy nobler self, thy life at best!" 

Throughout the records of antislavery you may find Summary, 
passionate indignation and self-devoted sincerity; but you 
shall search those records far and wide before you shall 
find a mate for this magnanimous utterance. As time 
passes, Whittier seems more and more the man among the 
antislavery leaders of New England whose spirit came 
nearest to greatness. 

So, as the years pass, he tends to emerge from the group 
of mere reformers, and to range himself too with the true 
men of letters. To them — to the literature of renascent 
New England, as distinguished from its politics, its scholar- 
ship, its religion, its philosophy, or its reform — we are 
now to turn. And we have come to this literature almost 
insensibly, in considering the work of one who, beginning 
life as a passionate reformer, may remain for posterity a 
living poet. 



X 

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 

References 

The Atlantic Monthly: The Atlantic Index, 1857-1S88, Boston, 
1889, gives a good idea of the contents of the magazine. One may also 
consult Scudder's Lowell, Morse's Holmes, and other biographies of the 
chief contributors to the Atlantic. 

Fields: There is no collected edition of Fields's works; for the separate 
titles of his books, several of which are still in print (Boston: Houghton), 
see Foley, 91-92. Mrs. Fields wrote a volume of Biographical Notes 
and Personal Sketches of her husband, which was published at Boston 
(by Houghton) in i88r. There are selections from Fields in Griswold's 
Poetry, 573-575; Stedman, 181-182; Stedman and Hutchinson, VIL 
309-311- 

In the autumn of 1857 there appeared in Boston the first 
number of the periodical, still in existence, which more than 
anything else represents the literature of the New England 
Renaissance. In the early years of the century, the char- 
acteristic publication of literary Boston was the North 
American Review. In the '40s the Dial, limited as was its 
circulation, was equally characteristic of contemporary 
literary energy. From 1857 until the renascent literature 
of New England came to an end, its vehicle was the Atlan- 
tic Monthly. 

This youngest and last of the native periodicals of Bos- 
ton may be distinguished from its predecessors in various 
ways. Obviously, for one thing, while the primary func- 
tion of the North American Review was scholarly, and that 
of the Dial philosophic, that of the Atlantic was literary. 

298 



The Atlantic Monthly 290 

In the second place, the North American Review was 
started by young men who at the moment had no vehicle 
for expression, and who felt that they had a good deal to 
say. The Dial was similarly started by a group of en- 
thusiasts comparatively little known in letters. The At- 
lantic, on the other hand, did little more than afford a 
regular means of publication for men whose reputation 
was already established. The earlier periodicals began 
youthfully; the Atlantic was always mature. 

We have spent what may have seemed excessive time 
on the environment of the mature literature which at last 
thus concentrated. Yet without a constant sense of the 
influences which were alive in New England, this literature 
can hardly be understood. It was all based on the tra- 
ditions of a rigid old society, Puritan in origin and im- 
memorially fixed in structure. To this, at the beginning Renascent 
of the nineteenth century, came that impulse of new life 
which expressed itself in such varied ways, — in the classi- 
cally rounded periods of our most finished oratory ; in the 
scholarship which ripened into our lasting works of history; 
and in the hopeful dreams of the Unitarians, passing in- 
sensibly into the nebulous philosophy of the Transcenden- 
talists, and finally into first fantastic and soon mihtant 
reform. Each of these phases of our Renaissance gave us 
names which are still memorable: Webster, Everett, and 
Choate; Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman; Em- 
erson, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau; Theodore Parker, 
Phillips, and Sumner; Mrs. Stowe, and Whittier. Thus 
grouped together, we can see these people to have been 
so dissimilar, and sometimes so antagonistic, that human 
friendship between them, or even mutual understanding, 
was hardly possible. At the same time, as we look at 



300 The Renaissance of Nexv England 

them together, we must see that all possessed in common a 
trait which marks them as of the old New England race. 
All were strenuously earnest; and though the earnestness 
of some confined itself to matters of this world, — to history, 
to politics, or to reform, — while that of others was centred, 
like that of the Puritan fathers, more on the unseen eter- 
nities, not one of them was ever free from a constant ideal 
of principle, of duty. Nor was the idealism of these men 
always confined to matters of conduct. In Emerson, more 
certainly than \r\ the fathers themselves, one feels the cease- 
less effort of New England to grasp, to understand, to 
formulate the realities which the evolutionists call un- 
knowable. The New Englanders of our Renaissance 
were no longer Puritans; they had discarded the dogmas 
of Calvinism ; but so far as Puritanism was a hfelong effort 
to recognize and to follow ideals which can never be ap- 
prehended by unaided human senses, they were still Puri- 
tan at heart. 
Spirit of Herein lies the trait which most clearly distinguishes 

lan^ and "of Ncw England from those neighboring Middle States where 
the Middle ^j-^g letters of America sprang into life a few years earlier. 

Ot3.t6S. 

In both, the impulse to expression which appeared so early 
in the nineteenth century may be held only an Ameri- 
can phase of the world-wide tendency to revolution which 
during the century effected so many changes in Europe. 
To both, too, this impulse came in a guise which may 
make the term "Renaissance" seem applicable equally to 
both. In New York, however, the impulse tended im- 
mediately to the production of an imitative literature 
which had done its best work by 1832; in New England, 
meanwhile, that same year was marked by Emerson's 
sermon on the Lord's Supper. Oratory was at its best; 



The Atlantic Monthly 301 

scholarship was swiftly developing; Unitarianism had 
completely dominated Boston; Transcendentahsm was 
just beginning; and not only destructive reform but pure 
letters too were still to come. 

With the Renaissance there came at last to New Eng- 
land an eager knowledge of all the phases of human thought 
and expression which enrich the records of modern civili- 
zation. The temper in which this new learning was re- 
ceived there is nowhere better typified than by the title and 
the contents of Emerson's Representative Men (1850). 
The personages whom he chose to group under this every- Enthusi- 
day title were Plato, the Philosopher; Swedenborg, the ^ewiy^dis- 
Mystic; Montaigne, the Sceptic; Shakspere, the Poet; covered 
Napoleon, the Man of the World ; and Goethe, the Writer. 
To Emerson, in short, and to the New England of which in 
his peculiar phrase he was a representative man, the whole 
range of literature was suddenly opened. Two centuries 
of national inexperience had deprived the region not only 
of critical power, but for the moment of all suspicion that 
this was lacking. With the fresh enthusiasm of discovery 
New England faced this newly found company of the good 
and great, feeling chiefly that even like ourselves these 
were men. 

Fifty years and more have done their work since those 
aspiring old times. Nowadays the fact that a book — 
ancient or modern — is an acknowledged classic is apt to 
make people assume that it cannot be interesting. In the 
full flush of our Renaissance, on the other hand, there 
was left in us something like the artless unconsciousness 
of healthy children, who are ready to enjoy anything no 
matter whether other people admire it or not. Partly be- 
cause of this eager delight in foreign literature, we were a 



302 The Renaissance of New England 



The Atlan- 
tic the 
Vehicle of 
Renascent 
Letters. 



little slow to make literature for ourselves. It is not that 
we lacked it, of course. The names we have already con- 
sidered belong not only to the history of those various 
phases of the Renaissance with which we have chosen to 
consider them, but to that of letters, too. Hardly one 
of these men, however, was primarily literary. All de- 
serve distinction in literary history chiefly because they 
did with loving care the writing 
which they held their earthly busi- 
ness. 

So the literature of New England 
matured slowly. It is more than 
an accident of date that the years 
when the Knickerbocker magazine 
began to fade out of New York, 
and with it the whole elder school 
of which it marked the blameless 
decline, saw in Boston the estab- 
lishment of the first periodical 
whose function was chiefly literary. 
The innocent old literature of pleasure which began with 
the novels of Brockden Brown was truly exhausted. The 
literature of New England, meanwhile, which had been 
ripening as its elder was falling into decay, had only just 
reached the point where it demanded a regular vehicle of 
expression. This vehicle came, to be sure, only when the 
strength of the New England Renaissance was beginning 
to fail. None of the New England men of letters, how- 
ever, had begun to feel the infirmities of age, when one and 
all found a common meeting-ground in the pages of the 
Atlantic Monthly. 

The Atlantic is thus associated with almost every name 




The Atlantic Monthly 303 

eminent in our later New England letters; but most closely 
of all, perhaps, with that of a man whose presence in Bos- 
ton had incalculable influence on local literary hfe. This 
was James Thomas Fields (1817-1881), for many years 
publisher of the Atlantic, and from 1862 to 1870 its editor. 

Fields was born at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Fields, 
educated only in the common schools there. When a 
mere boy he began active life as a clerk in a Boston book- 
store. At twenty-two he was already partner in a pub- 
lishing house; and he remained an active publisher in 
Boston for thirty-five years, retiring with a comfortable 
fortune. Fields is memorable, however, not because of 
his practical gifts, nor yet because in a modest way he 
was himself a man of letters, but rather because of his 
deep and excellent influence on the literature of New 
England. 

From boyhood Fields had oved literature; and this 
enthusiasm combined with great personal amiabihty and 
with sympathetic kindness of nature to make him, before 
he reached middle life, the intimate personal friend of 
every man of letters in New England, and of many such 
men in the old world too. The result of this is evident to 
any one who will glance at the trade-Hsts of the firm of 
which he was for years the head. Here, to go no further, 
you will find the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, 
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Hawthorne. There 
are plenty of other honorable American names there, too, 
as well as those of eminent foreign writers. For one thing, 
Fields was the first to collect and to set forth in systematic 
form the work of Thomas De Quincey, until Fields's 
time lost in numberless periodicals. As a sincere lover of 
letters and a publisher of unusual tact and skill, Fields, 



304 The Renaissance of New England 

during the years between 1840 and 1870, afforded the 
literary men of New England a rare opportunity. One 
and all had constantly near by a skilful publisher, who 
was at the same time a wise counsellor, a warm personal 
friend, and an ardent admirer. The stimulus to Hterary 
production afforded by such a patron of letters can hardly 
be estimated. 



XI 

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 

References 

Works: Riverside Edition, ii vols., Boston: Houghton, 1886; Cam- 
bridge Edition, i vol., Boston: Houghton, 1893. The latter does not in- 
clude Longfellow's translation of Dante. 

Biography and Criticism: *Samuel Longfellow, Life and Letters of 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1891; G. R. 
Carpenter, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Boston: Small, Maynard & 
Co., 1901 (bb); T. W. Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Boston: 
Houghton, 1902 (aml); E. S. Robertson, Life of Henry Wadsworth Long- 
fellow, London: Scott, 1887 (gw); *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter 
vi. 

Bibliography: E. S. Robertson's Longfellow, i-xii (at end); Foley, 
174-180; Longfellotv Collector's Handbook, a Bibliography of First Edi- 
tions, New York: Benjamin, 1885. 

Selections: Carpenter, 248-256; Duyckinck, II, 445-450; Griswold, 
Poets, 356-362; Griswold, Prose, 496-502; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 
108; Stedman, 111-126; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 282-324. 

Among the men of letters who in mature life gathered Life. 
about the Atlantic Monthly the most popular was Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Born at Port- 
land, Maine, where his father was a lawyer, he went at 
fifteen to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, where he 
took his degree in 1825. At that time there were also 
at Bowdoin J. S. C. Abbott, the historian, Franklin Pierce, 
who became President of the United States, and Nathaniel 
Hawthorne. During these college years, too, the spirit of 
Renaissance was freshest in New England air. Chan- 
ning's great sermon on Unitarianism had been preached 

305 



306 The Renaissance of New England 



Smith 
Professor- 
ship. 



in i8ig; Emerson's sermon on the Lord's Supper, which 
marks the beginning of transcendental disintegration, was 
not preached until 1832. Longfellow's youth, in brief, 
came just when the religious and philosophic buoyancy 
of the New England Renaissance was surging; and this 
affected him all the more because in a region and at a 

college where old-fashioned or- 
thodoxy still prevailed, he was 
from the beginning a Unitarian. 
When Longfellow graduated 
from Bowdoin at the age of 
nineteen, Ticknor's teaching at 
Harvard, then in its seventh 
year, had made such general 
impression that the authorities 
of Bowdoin began to desire 
something similar there. In 
1826, accordingly, Longfellow 
went abroad under an agree- 
ment to prepare himself, by a three years' study of mod- 
ern languages, for a Bowdoin professorship which 
should resemble Ticknor's at Harvard. In 1829 he 
came home with a reading knowledge of Spanish, Ital- 
ian, French, and German, and began to teach at Bowdoin. 
Six years later, when Ticknor retired from teaching, he 
recommended Longfellow to the Corporation of Harvard; 
and Longfellow, who up to that time had had little personal 
relation with Cambridge, accepted the Smith professorship. 
To prepare himself for this wider field of work, he went 
abroad for a year more. In 1836 he began his teaching 
at Harvard, which continued for eighteen years. 

As these years went on, Longfellow, like Ticknor, felt 




■^Vlow^ Vv <:i,<^av-c)4flJtUK 



Henry JVadsworth Longfellow ^07 

more and more how gravely the drudgery of teaching 
must interfere with work which time may well prove more 
lasting and significant. His constant, enthusiastic wish 
was to be a poet. In 1854 he consequently resigned the 
professorship. The next year it was given to James 
Russell Lowell, who held it, at least in title, until his death 
in 1891. 

Up to 1854, Longfellow, although already popular as a 
poet, remained a college professor of a new and radical 
subject. Though he always loved this subject, he hated 
the use which his professional circumstances compelled 
him to make of it. The instinct which made him recoil 
from the drudgery of teaching was sound : his true mission 
was not to struggle with unwilling hearers; it was rather 
to set forth in words which should find their way to the 
eager readers of a continent the spirit as distinguished 
from the letter of the literatures with which as a professor 
he conscientiously dealt so long. 

From 1854 to the end, Longfellow lived as a profes- Longfellow 
sional author in that fine old Cambridge house which before bridge"" 
his time was conspicuous as the deserted mansion of some 
Tories exiled by the Revolution, and which is now conse- 
crated as the home of the most widely popular and beloved 
American poet. Long before he died, his reputation as a 
man of letters was so firmly established that people had 
almost forgotten how he had once been a college teacher. 

For this forgetfulness there is plenty of reason. Though 
throughout Longfellow's professorship he had felt its 
duties seriously to prevent literary labor, he had produced 
during his incumbency much of his most familiar verse. 
His Voices oj the Night appeared in 1839, his Evangeline 
in 1847, and his Golden Legend in 185 1. Even before 



308 Tlie Renaissance of New England 

he laid his professorship down, there were hundreds who 
knew him as a poet for every one who knew that he was a 
teacher. In point of fact, too, the work which he did dur- 
ing the twenty-seven years of his purely hterary life hardly 
extended, although it certainly maintained, the poetical 




^^^St^f^SfT'- 



LONGFELLOW'S HOME, CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE. 



reputation which he had already established during his 
twenty-five years of teaching. To understand his real 
character as a poet, however, we must constantly keep in 
mind that other profession of teacher which he so faithfully 
practised for a full third of his hfe. 

The subjects which Longfellow taught now have a famil- 
iar place in every good college. In his time they resem- 
bled some newly discovered continent, where whole realms 
of country are still unknown. To Longfellow, accordingly, 
the true business of his professorship seemed like that of 
an enthusiastic explorer. The languages which he learned 



Henry Wadsworih Longfellow 309 

so eagerly never seemed to him deserving of lifelong study 
for themselves; they were merely vehicles of expression 
which carried him into new and wonderful worlds of beau- 
tiful old humanity. These vehicles were to be loved so 
far as in beautiful form they conveyed to us thoughts in- 
trinsically beautiful and noble, but they were at best 
vehicles, whose use was to lead us into inexhaustible 
regions of humanity, unknown except by vague tradition to 
our American ancestors. 

In his love for literature thus considered, Longfellow Academic 
never wavered. What vexed him throughout the years ^™p^''- 
of his teaching was not the matter with which he dealt ; it 
was rather that he shrank from imparting literature to un- 
wiUing pupils, that he longed to saturate himself with it 
and to express unfettered the sentiments which it unfail- 
ingly stirred within him. These sentiments, which he 
uttered in a manner so welcome to all America, seemed 
to him as spontaneous as ever inspiration seemed to poets 
who have heard the true whisper of the Muse. Yet one 
who now studies his work can hardly help feeling that even 
though he never suspected the fact, his temper as a man 
of letters was almost as academic as was the profession to 
which he reluctantly devoted year after year of his maturity. 

Even as a teacher Longfellow remained a man of 
letters; he felt constantly stirred to what he believed origi- 
nal expression, and he was never content unless he was 
phrasing as well as he could the emotions which arose 
within him amid all the drudgery of work. But if in this 
aspect Longfellow was a genuine man of letters, he was all 
the while an academic scholar; for the influence which 
stirred him most was not what he experienced, but rather 
what he read. From beginning to end he was inspired 



310 The Renaissance of New England 



Much of 
his Poetry 
suggested 
by his 
Reading. 



Popular- 
ity. 



chiefly, if not wholly, by noble and beautiful records of 
facts long since dead and gone. Whoever will take the 
trouble to look through an index of the titles of Longfel- 
low's poems will at once be struck by the number of sub- 
jects suggested by foreign travel or by reading in foreign 
literature. Among these are most of the Talcs oj a Way- 
side Inn (1849-1873), the greater part of Chrishis (1849- 
1872), which Longfellow considered one of his most im- 
portant poems; the translation of Dante's Divina Corn- 
media (1867) and many shorter translations from French, 
German, Spanish, Italian, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and other 
sources; the romances Outre- Mer (1835), Hyperion 
(1839), and KavanagJi (1849); ^^id many short poems of 
various degrees of originality. 

Though this limitation marks Longfellow apart from 
those great poets who have immortally expressed the 
meaning of actual life, it had at once the grace of sincerity, 
and the added grace of that natural gift which was per- 
haps Longfellow's most salient. His taste was unerring. 
Wherever he met the beauties of literature he delighted in 
them instinctively; and in his instinctive feelings about 
literature there was something very hke the confidence in 
human nature which inspired the world in which he lived. 
To him literature was a region of delight so fresh that he 
could rejoice in its beauties, which he perceived with such 
instant tact, and could honestly be blind to everything not 
beautiful or noble. 

The impression which he made on his first readers has 
never been better phrased than by Mr. Stedman — 

"A new generation may be at a loss to conceive the eflfectof Long- 
fellow's work when It first began to appear. I may convey something 
of this by what is at once a memory and an illustration. Take the 



Henry IVadsworth Longfellow 311 

case of a child whose Sunday outlook was restricted, in a decaying 
Puritan village, to a wooden meeting-house of the old Congregational 
type. The interior — plain, colorless, rigid with dull white pews and 
dismal galleries — increased the spiritual starvation of a young nature 
unconsciously longing for color and variety. Many a child like this 
one, on a first holiday visit to the town, seeing the vine-grown walls, 
the roofs and arches, of a graceful Gothic church, has felt a sense of 
something rich and strange; and many, now no longer children, can 
remember that the impression upon entrance was such as the stateli- 
est cathedral now could not renew. The columns and tinted walls, the 
ceiling of oak and blue, the windows of gules and azure and gold — • 
the service, moreover, with its chant and organ-roll — all this enrap- 
tured and possessed them. To the one relief hitherto afforded them, 
that of nature's picturesqueness — which even Calvinism endured 
without compunction — was added a new joy, a glimpse of the beauty 
and sanctity of human art. A similar delight awaited the first readers 
of Longfellow's prose and verse. Here was a painter and a romancer 
indeed, who had journeyed far and returned with gifts for all at 
home, and who promised often and again to 

'sing a more wonderful song 
Or tell a more marvellous tale.' " 

The hold which Longfellow thus took on enthusiastic 
American youth he soon took on the whole reading pubHc 
of our country. His popularity is evident in our general 
familiarity with the creatures of his fancy. The village 
blacksmith, the youth who bears 'mid snow and ice a ban- 
ner with the strange device Excelsior, the skipper wrecked 
on the reef of Norman's Woe, Evangeline, Hiawatha, 
Miles Standish, John Alden, Priscilla the Puritan maiden, 
and even Paul Revere — figures and names which we owe 
almost wholly to Longfellow — he has made us apt to Limita- 
group with Bible patriarchs or the world-old heroes of 
antiquity. Such popularity almost implies a weakness. 
Profundity of substance, or excellence of form, rarely 



tions. 



312 Tlie Renaissance of New England 

touches the masses; and Longfellow's very popularity 
resulted long ago in a reaction against him among the 
fastidious. Even in early days, too, when his popularity 
was in its first flush, the admiration which his work excited 
was clouded by occasional dissent. Margaret Fuller, for 




LONGFELLOW IN HIS LIBRARY. 



example, conscientiously devoted to the extravagance of 
Transcendental philosophy, found Longfellow shallow, 
and said so. Poe utterly misunderstood the academic 
character of Longfellow's mind, and accused him of plagi- 
arism. And there was more such criticism. 

Again, Longfellow, a lifelong friend of Charles Sumner, 
always sympathized with the antislavery movement; and 
in 1842 he pubhshed some poems in its behalf. These 
poems are perfectly sincere; but one needs only to com- 



Henri) Wadsworth Longfellow 313 

pare them with the similar work of Whittier to feel more 
strongly than ever Longfellow's lack of passion. 

But this is more than enough of his faults and limita- simplicity 
tions. He has passed from us too lately to permit us ^^ 
to dwell upon the singular serenity and beauty of his Longfei- 
personal life and character. No one can read its records Q^Aiits. 
or remember anything of its facts without feeling the rare 
quality of a nature which throughout a lifetime could persist 
unspoiled by prosperity and unbroken by poignant personal 
sorrows. To be sure, he was never passionate; neither 
in his life nor in his verse does he ever seem to have been 
swept away by feeling. On the other hand, as we have 
seen, his taste was unerring, and his sentiment gently sym- 
pathetic. His real office was to explore and to make 
known that modern literature in whose beauty he delighted. 
And if the verse in which he set forth his delight be hardly 
of the kind which enriches world-literature, its lucidity of 
phrase and its delicacy of rhythm combine to give it a sen- 
timental beauty which must long endear it to those who 
love simplicity of heart. 

Thereby, after all, Longfellow comes very near a world- 
old definition of Hterary greatness, which has sometimes 
been held the virtue of those who think the thoughts of the Summary, 
wise and who speak the language of the simple. It may 
be that he knew few wise thoughts which were all his own; 
but he so truly loved the wisdom and the beauty of those 
elder literatures which he was the first of Americans fully 
to recognize, that he absorbed in a way of his own the 
wisdom which the good and the great of the past had 
gleaned from experience. At first, to be sure, it may seem 
that those considerable parts of his work which deal with 
our native country are of another stripe. More and more, 



314 The Renaissance of New England 

however, one grows to feel that, despite the subjects, these 
are not indigenous in sentiment. Rather, for the first 
time, they illuminate our American past with a glow of 
conventional romance. So by and by we find that our 
gently academic poet has just been thinking about New 
England in such moods as he loved in countless old-world 
poets who early and late recorded the historic romance of 
Europe. Yet Longfellow does not seem to have been con- 
sciously imitative. He sincerely believed that he was 
making spontaneous American poetry. Whatever his 
lack of passion or imagination, he was never false to him- 
self. Whether he ever understood his mission it is hard 
to say; but what that mission was is clear; and so is the 
truth that he was a faithful missionary. Never relaxing 
his effort to express in beautiful language meanings which 
he truly believed beautiful, he revealed to the untutored 
new world the romantic beauty of the old. And suffusing 
even our simple native traditions with a glow of romance, 

"He left his native air the sweeter for his song." 



XII 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

References 

Works: Riverside Edition, ii vols., Boston: Houghton, 1890-92; 
Poetical Works, Cambridge Edition, i vol., Boston: Houghton, 1896; 
Last Poems, ed. C. E. Norton, Boston: Houghton, 1S95; Letters, ed. 
C. E. Norton, 2 vols.. New York: Harper, 1894. 

Biography and Criticism: H. E. Scudder, James Russell Loivell : A 
Biography, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1901 ; E. E. Hale, James Russell 
Lowell and His Friends, Boston: Houghton, 1899; Wendell, Stelligeri, 
205-2 1 7 ; Stedman, Poets of A merica. Chapter ix. 

Bibliography: Foley, 180-187; *Scuddcr's Lijc, II, 421-447. 

Selections: *Carpenter, 363-382; Duyckinck, II, 661-663; Gris- 
wold, Poets, 566-572; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, Nos. 9, 15; Stedman, 
202-218; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 411-448. 

In 1854 Longfellow resigned the Smith professorship at Life. 
Harvard College. The next year James Russell Low- 
ell (1819-1891) was appointed his successor. Up to 
this time Lowell's career, though more limited than Long- 
fellow's, had been similar. He was born at Cambridge, 
the son of a Unitarian minister whose church was in Bos- 
ton. In 1838 he took his degree at Harvard; he studied 
law; but he found this profession distasteful, and his 
true interest was in letters. For fifteen years before his 
appointment to the Smith professorship, he had been 
professionally a literary man. From this time on, for a 
full twenty-two years, his ostensible profession became 
what Longfellow's had been from 1836 to 1854, and 

315 



316 The Renaissance of New England 

Ticknor's from 1817 to 1835, — the teaching of modern 
languages and hterature to Harvard undergraduates. 

The different tasks to which the successive Smith pro- 
fessors addressed themselves might once have seemed a 
question of different personalities ; to-day they seem rather 
a question of developing American culture. Ticknor's 
business was to introduce to New England a fresh range of 
learning; and accordingly his most characteristic publi- 
Teaching. cation was the comprehensive, accurate, unimaginative 
History oj Spanish Literal arc (1849). When, after twenty 
years, Longfellow succeeded him, America knew modern 
literature by name, but, except perhaps for Bryant's trans- 
lations, hardly more. Thus it became Longfellow's task 
to make pupils enjoy excursions into that limitless world 
of modern literature which for America was still newly 
discovered. In 1855, when Lowell came to his work, the 
conditions had altered again. The main facts of modern 
Hterature had become familiar; and the New England 
Renaissance had greatly stimulated general reading. To 
the generation with which Lowell came to his maturity, 
the great modern masters — Spenser and Shakspere, 
Dante and Cervantes and Goethe — were thus as freshly 
delightful as the old Greeks had been to the culture of 
fifteenth-century Italy. Modern literature had been 
discovered, it had been enthusiastically explored, and 
now came the task of understanding it. So as a college 
teacher, and as a critical writer too, Lowell's professional 
task was interpretative. 

The eminence which finally made Lowell a national 
figure came not from his teaching, but from the social 
accomplishment with which from 1877 to 1885 he filled the 
office of United States minister, first to Spain and later to 



James Russell Lowell 



317 



England. This fact that Lowell's eminence came late Sense of 
in life is characteristic. Throughout his career, as man ^\ i^n^^,^" 
of letters and as teacher alike, he had been at once helped gr"o«s 

Impres- 

and hindered by pecuharities of temperament conquer- sions. 
able only by the full experience of a slow maturity. 
Born and brought up in Cambridge, when Cambridge 
was still a village, he was fa- 
miliar with the now vanished 
country folk of old New Eng- 
land. From youth he was 
passionately fond of general 
reading, in days when this led 
no Yankee away from sound 
literature. Though impa- 
tient of minute scholarship, 
too, he possessed one of the 
most important traits of a 
minute scholar: by nature he 
was aware of detail in every 
impression, and careful of it 
in every expression. What 
truly interested him, to be 

sure, in life and in books alike, were the traits which make 
books and life most broadly human. In his effort to un- 
derstand humanity, however, he was incessantly hampered 
by his constitutional sense of detail. There were for him 
aspects in which both books and life seemed profoundly 
serious; there were other aspects in which even the most 
serious phases of both seemed whimsically absurd. And 
truly to understand the complex unity of humanity, he 
felt, you must somehow fuse all these, — life and books, 
sublimity and humor, light and twilight and shadow. 





h-n£^ 



318 2^ he Renaissance of New England 

The fact that Lowell was constantly sensitive to incom- 
patible impressions was not his only temperamental ob- 
stacle. The well-known circumstance that he was unable 
satisfactorily to revise his writing indicates how completely 
he was possessed by each of his various moods, which 




ELMWOOD, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., BIRTHPLACE OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

often chased one another in bewildering confusion, yet 
again left him for prolonged intervals in what seemed to 
him states of hopeless stagnation. Throughout this un- 
certainty, however, one can feel in his literary temper two 
constant, antagonistic phases. His purity of taste, par- 
ticularly as he grew older, approached Longfellow's. 
Yet all the while he was incessantly impelled to whimsical 
extravagance of thought, feeling, and utterance. The trait 
appears in his fondness for cramming his published essays 
with obscure allusions to unheard of oddities in the byways 
of literature and history. If one took these seriously, they 



James Russell Lowell 319 

would be abominably pedantic. In fact, however, this 
mannerism was only a rather juvenile prank. Life puzzled 
Lowell, and in revenge Lowell amused himself by puzzling 
the people he talked to or wrote for. It is no wonder that 
this paradoxical conflict between purity of taste and mis- 
chievous extravagance of temper retarded his maturity. 

Lowell's temperament, again, involved somewhat un- 
usual sensitiveness to the influences which from time to 
time surrounded him. Early in life he married a woman 
remarkable alike for charms and for gifts, who was enthu- 
siastically devoted to the reforms then in the air. It was 
partly because of her influence, apparently, that Lowell for 
a while proved so hot-headed a reformer. After her pre- 
mature death this phase of his temper became less evident. 
It was revived, of course, by the passionate days of civil 
war, when he upheld extreme Northern sentiments with 
all his might; and the depth of his experience finally re- 
sulted in the " Commemoration Ode," which chiefly entitles 
him to consideration as a serious poet. Yet this ode itself, 
though quickly written and little revised, is marked rather 
by exceptionally sustained seriousness of feeling than by 
anything which seems simply, sensuously passionate. 
One of the traits for which you must search Lowell's vol- 
umes long is lyrical spontaneity. Lowell was a man of 
deep, but constantly various and whimsically incongruous, 
emotional nature, whose impulse to expression was con- 
stantly hampered by all manner of importunate external 
impressions. 

For all this, the chances are that, hke Longfellow, Low- vision of 
ell would have been apt to consider himself most seriously 
as a poet; and certainly his poems most clearly express 
his individuality. His first volume of verse appeared in 



Sir Laun- 
fal. 



320 The Renaissance of New England 

1841, three years after his graduation, and in 1844 and 
1848 he published other such volumes. In these there is 
nothing particularly characteristic. Honest, careful, sin- 
cere enough, the work seems ; but except for the eminence 
finally attained by its author little of it would attract at- 
tention to-day. This early verse reached its acme in the 
Vision of Sir Laimfal, published in 1848. The familiar 
stanza from the prelude to Part I, beginning, "And what 
is so rare as a day in June ?" is typical of the whole. It is 
the work of a man who has read a great deal of poetry, 
and who is thus impelled to write. Somewhat in the 
mood of Wordsworth — to whom three stanzas before he 
has alluded — he tries to express the impression made upon 
him by Nature. He succeeds only in making Nature seem 
a pretty phase of literature. It is all very serious, no 
doubt, and sweet in purpose; but it is never spontaneously 
lyric. 

Fable for In 1 848 also camc two other publications, which show a 
very different Lowell; one is the Fable for Critics, the other 
the first collection of the Biglow Papers, which had begun 
to appear in the Boston Courier two years earlier. In a 
study like ours, the Fable for Critics is a useful document. 
Ten years out of college and already a professional writer, 
alertly alive to the contemporary condition of American 
letters, Lowell at last permitted himself to write with 
unrestricted freedom. The result is queer. The fable, 
so far as there is any, proves as commonplace as the 
Vision of Sir Launfal; and, besides, it is obscured by such 
whimsicality and pedantry as hampered Lowell all his 
life. At the same time, his portraits of contemporary 
American writers, in many cases made long before their 
best work was done, are marked not only by a serious 



Critics. 



James Russell Lowell 321 

critical spirit, but by acute good sense and surprising 
felicity of idiomatic phrase. You can rarely find more 
suggestive criticism anywhere than what the Fable for 
Critics says of Emerson, Theodore Parker, Bryant, 
Whittier, Hawthorne, Cooper, Poe, Longfellow, Willis, 
Irving, Holmes, or Lowell himself. It is good criticism, 
too, sincerely stating the impression made on a singularly 
alert contemporary mind by writers who have now 
acquired what they did not then surely possess, a fair 
prospect of permanence; and the very fantastic oddity 
of its style, which makes prolonged sessions with it 
tiresome, has a touch not only of native Yankee temper 
but of incontestable individuality. At last permitting 
himself the full license of extravagant, paradoxical form, 
Lowell revealed all his amateurish faults; but he revealed 
too all those peculiar contradictory qualities which made 
the true Lowell a dozen men at once. Nobody else could 
have written quite this thing, and it was worth writing. 

More worth writing still, and equally characteristic, Bigiow 
were the Bigiow Papers, which were collected at about the 
same time. They were written during the troubles of 
the Mexican War. The slave States had plunged the 
country into that armed aggression, which excited as 
never before the full fervor of the antislavery feeling in 
the North. Just at this time the influence of Lowell's 
wife made his antislavery convictions strongest. No 
technical form could seem much less literary than that in 
which he chose to express his passionate sentiments. 
Using the dialect of his native Yankee country, and em- 
phasizing its oddities of pronunciation by extravagant 
misspelling, he produced a series of verses which have an 
external aspect of ephemeral popularity. At first glance, 



Papers. 



Power. 



322 The Renaissance of New England 

the laborious humor of Parson Wilbur's pedantry, and the 
formal, interminable phrases in which he imbeds it, seem 
radically different from the lines on which they comment. 
As you ponder on them, however, Wilbur's elaborately 
over-studied prose and the dialect verse of Hosea Biglow 
and Bird-o'-Freedom Sawin fall into the same category. 
Both prove so deliberate, both so much matters of detail, 
that in the end your impression may well be, that, taken 
all in all, each paper is tediously ingenious. No one num- 
ber of the Biglow Papers is so long as the Fable for Critics; 
but none is much easier to read through. 

In the Biglow Papers, at the same time, just as in the 
Fable for Critics, you feel constant flashes of Lowell's 
Their rarest power; in compactly idiomatic phrase he could sum 

up matters on which you may endlessly ponder with 
constantly fresh delight and suggestion. Take a familiar 
stanza from the first paper of all — 

" Ez fer war, I call it murder, — 

There you hev it plain an' flat; 
I don't want to go no furder 

Than my Testyment fer that; 
God hez sed so plump an' fairly. 

It's ez long ez it is broad, 
An' you've got to git up airly 

Ef you want to take in God." 

To bring a phrase like those last two lines within the 
range of decency, requires a power for which genius is 
hardly an excessive name. Yet Lowell, spontaneously 
true to his paradoxical, whimsical self, has made what 
looks like comic verse, and is phrased in a caricature of 
Yankee dialect, a memorable statement of tremendous 
truth. 



James Russell Lowell 323 

What Lowell did in this first of the Biglow Papers he 
did in all such verse which he ever wrote. In 1862, he 
produced "Mason and Slidell, a Yankee Idyll." This 
ends with some stanzas on Jonathan and John, of which 
the phrasing is as final as anything which Lowell's fan- 
tastic pen ever put on paper: 

" The South says, 'Poor folks down!'' John, 

An' 'All men up !' say we,^ 
White, yaller, black, an' brown, John: 

Now which is your idee ? 

Ole Uncle S. sez he, ' I guess, 

John preaches wal,' sez he : 
* But, sermon thru, an' come to dii, 

Why, there's the old J. B. 

A crowdin' you an' me!' " 

Lowell was really at his best when he let himself be 
most fantastic, and this because of that whimsical insta- 
bihty of temper, which he rarely managed quite to control. 
Beneath his wildest vagaries you will often feel deep ear- 
nestness; but he lacked the power generally to sustain 
either mood quite long enough to express it with complete 
effect. The merit of his verses generally lies in admirable 
single phrases, single lines, or at most single stanzas. These 
flashing felicities never have quite the power which should 
fuse a whole poem into congruous unity. Like Lowell's 
pp'"' ""ost characteristic verse seems a bewil- 

of disjointed fragments, each admirable 
icere humanity. 
7 which so pervades Lowell's poetry equally Prose 
prose writings. Open these wherever you 
the portions which deal with public affairs, 
•le in those considerable portions which criti- 



Wri tings 



324 The Renaissance of New England 

cise literature, and you will anywhere find this same fan- 
tastic, boyishly pedantic range of allusion. You will find, 
too, all sorts of unexpected turns of phrase, often rushing 
into actual puns; again you will find elaborate rhetorical 
structure, stimulated by those great draughts of old Eng- 
lish prose which Lowell could quaff with gusto all his 
life. "Literary" you feel this man again and again; but 
by and by you begin to feel that, after all, this literature 
proceeds from an intensely human being with a peculiarly 
Yankee nature. Somewhere about him there is always 
lurking a deep seriousness strangely at odds with his ob- 
vious mannerisms and his fantastic oddities of literary 
behavior. The literature he loved presented itself to him 
as the lasting impression of what life had meant to men 
as human as himself. Let us read, as sympathetically as 
we can, he constantly seems to urge, the works of these 
great fellows who after all were only men like ourselves. 
You shall search far before you shall find a more famihar 
interpreter of literature than he. Yet few were ever more 
sensitive to the nobility of wisdom and of beauty. 

During Lowell's professorship at Harvard he was for 
some years editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and later had a 
share in editing the North American Review. At this 
Later pcHod most of his prose was published. Hi^ ' ' ^r writing, 

produced after his diplomatic career b '^t\v 

occasional; but all along it tended slowl_, 
the end it gained at least in simplicity » 
this dignity was not assumed, but deveL 
slowly attained maturity and with that knov 
pean life which came during his diplomatic 
gained something which at last gave his utt 
with their old earnestness and humanity, a 



Work. 



">Q 



James Russell Lowell 325 

respecting humility. Nothing shows him more at his best 
than the short speech on " Our Literature" which he made 
in response to a toast at a banquet given in New York to 
commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Wash- 
ington's inauguration. The simple hopefulness of the 
closing paragraph, where for once Lowell was not afraid 
to be commonplace, is a fit and admirable conclusion for 
the six volumes of his collected prose: 

"The literature of a people should be the record of its joys and 
sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, 
the confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own as yet suffices 
us, but I believe that he who stands, a hundred years hence, where I 
am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and 
prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak 
of our literature with the assurance of one who beholds what we 
hope for and aspire after, become a reality and a possession 
forever." 

So if one asks where Lowell finally belongs in the history 
of our New England Renaissance, the answer begins to 
phrase itself. A born Yankee and a natural lover of letters, 
he instinctively turned at once to books and to life for the 
knowledge which should teach him what humanity has Summary, 
meant and what it has striven for. For all the oddities of 
temper which kept him from popularity, the man was al- 
ways true to his intensely human self. In his nature there 
were constant struggles between pure taste and perverse 
extravagance. As a man of letters, consequently, he 
was most himself when he permitted himself forms of 
expression in which these struggles needed no conceal- 
ment. But through it all there persists just such whole- 
some purity of feeling and purpose as we love to think 
characteristic of New England. Throughout, despite 



Humanist. 



320 The Renaissance of New England 

whimsical extravagance of plirase, you may discern a 
nature at once manly and human. 
Lowell the "Human," after all, is the word which most often recurs 
as one tries to phrase what Lowell means. In one sense 
the most truly human being is he who most strives to un- 
derstand those records of the past to which we give the 
name of the humanities. In another sense the most deeply 
human being is he who strives most to understand the 
humanity about him. It was unceasing effort to fuse his 
understanding of the humanities with his understanding 
of humanity which made Lowell so often seem paradoxical. 
He was in constant doubt as to which of these influences 
signified the more; and this doubt so hampered his power 
of expression that the merit of his writing lies mostly in 
disjointed phrases. At their best, however, these phrases 
are full of humanity and of the humanities ahke. In dis- 
tinction from Ticknor, the scholar of our New England 
Renaissance, and from Longfellow, its academic poet, 
Lowell defines himself more and more clearly as its earnest 
humanist. 



XIII 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

References 

Works: Riverside Edition, 14 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1891; Poems, 
Cambridge Edition, Boston: Houghton, 1895. 

Biography and Criticism: J. T. Morse, Jr., Life and Letters 0} 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1896; Stedman, Poets 
of America, Chapter viii. 

Bibliography: Foley, 129-142. 

Selections: Duyckinck, II, 513-517; Griswold, Poets, 416-423; 
Hart, Contemporaries, IV, No. 66; Stedman, 153-162; *Stedman and 
Hutchinson, VII, 3-37. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes (i 809-1 894) was born at Parentage. 
Cambridge, where his father, a Connecticut man and a 
graduate of Yale, had for some years been the Calvinistic 
minister of the First Church. Though Harvard College 
had already yielded to Unitarianism, this had not yet 
achieved the social conquest of the region. During Dr. 
Holmes's boyhood and youth, however, the struggle grew 
fierce; and at about the time of his graduation, his father, 
whose devotion to the old creed never wavered, was for- 
mally deposed from the pulpit which, after nearly forty 
years of occupancy, he stoutly refused to open to Uni- 
tarian doctrine. The old man, than whom none was ever 
more faithfully courageous, was supported by a majority of 
the communicants of the Cambridge church; a majority 
of the parish, however, preferred the other side. Ac- 
cordingly, Abiel Holmes, with his saving remnant of church 
members, was forced to establish a new place of worship. 

327 



328 TJie Renaissance of New England 



Life. 



Now Dr. Holmes, in the matter of faithful courage, was 
his father's counterpart. So, in comparatively early life, 
finding himself unable to accept the Calvinistic teachings 
of his youth, he became what he remained all his hfe, — a 
stout Unitarian. 

Dr. Holmes's maternal grandfather was a judge and a 
Fellow of Harvard College. Thus hereditai-ily allied with 
both pulpit and bar, Holmes was 
doul^ly what he used to call a 
New England Brahmin. Like 
any good orthodox boy, he was 
sent to school at Andover; and 
thence, like any good Cambridge 
boy, he was sent to Harvard. 
After taking his degree in 1829, 
he began the study of law; but 
finding this not congenial, he 
soon turned to medicine. In 
pursuance of this study he went 
abroad for two or three years, 
finally receiving the degree Qf Doctor of Medicine in 
1836. After a year or two of practice he became in 
1839 Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College. A 
year later he returned to Boston, where he remained 
for the rest of his hfe; and from 1847 to 1882 he was Park- 
man Professor of Anatomy in the Harvard Medical School. 
Extreme localism of professional character and social 
position is characteristic of Holmes throughout life. After 
1840, when he finally settled in Boston, he rarely passed 
a consecutive month outside of Massachusetts. Among 
Boston careers perhaps the only other of eminence which 
was so uninterruptedly local is that of Cotton Mather. 




^^cl~e^ /^^z^j^(^<s^;W. 



Oliver Wcnddl Holmes 



a2d 



The intolerant Calvinistic minister typifies seventeenth- 
century Boston; the Unitarian physician typifies the Bos- 
ton of the century just past. To both ahke, Beacon Hill Nature of 
instinctively presented itself, in the phrase vi^hich Holmes ^"'.""^^ ^ 

■^ r T sr Eminence. 

has made so familiar, as the Hub of the Solar System. 

Though throughout Holmes's fifty years of Boston resi- 
dence he was a man of local eminence, his eminence was 




HOLMES'S BIRTHPLACE, CAMBRIDGE, 

not quite of a professional kind. His practice, in which 
he took no excessive interest, gradually faded away; and 
long before he gave up his lectures on anatomy, they were 
held old-fashioned. He neither n.eglected nor disliked 
his profession, but it did not absr rb him; and as his life 
proceeded, he probably gre'w les , and less patient of that 
overwhelming mass of newly di'^.covered detail which mod- 
ern physicians must constant'iy master. Another reason 
why his medical career bccarine less and less important is 
that from the beginning he Inad a keen interest in literature 
and was widely known a^, a poet. Now, a man eminent 



380 The Renaissance of New England 

in a learned profession may certainly be eminent in letters 
too, but public opinion hates to have him so; and any 
youth who would succeed in law or medicine can hear no 
sounder advice than that which Dr. Holmes often gave 
in his later years, — namely, that you should never let 
people suppose you seriously interested in anything but 
your regular work.* In the very year when Holmes 
returned from Europe to begin practice, he published a 
volume of poems, and at least three subsequent collec- 
tions appeared before; with the beginning of the Atlantic 
Monthly, he became known as a remarkable writer of prose. 
His writings, in fact, steadily distracted attention from his 
profession. Nor is this the whole story. Holmes's local 
eminence was perhaps chiefly due to his social gifts. Early 
in life he acquired the reputation of being the best talker 
ever heard in Boston; and this he maintained unbroken 
to the very end. 

In ins later life his conversation and his wit ahke, always 
spontaneous and often of a quality which would have been 
excellent anywhere, are said sometimes to have been 
overwhelming. His talk tended to monologue, and his 
wit to phrases so final that nobody could think of anything 
to say in return. There was humorous and characteristic 
good-nature in that title, the Autocrat of the Breakfast 
Table, which he gave, so early as 1831, to a couple of arti- 
cles written for the now 'forgotten Neiu England Magazine. 
Fully twenty-five years t'lapsed before he published any- 
thing else of the kind, "^hen, when in 1857 he began 
those papers under the s'*"ne title which have become 
permanent in our literature/'^is opening phrase is whim- 
sically characteristic: "I wa. '^'going to say, when I was 

* Morse's Lije, .' 158-161. 



Oliver Wendell Holmes 



881 



interrupted." Whereupon, after twenty-five years of 
interruption, he proceeds with the autocratic utterances 
now famihar all over the world. The contagious good- 
humor of this title, like the whimsicality of that little ref- 
erence to the lapse of a quarter of a century, indicates the 




COMMENCEMENT DAY AT HARVARD IN HOLMES'S TIME. 
From Josiuh Quincy's "History of Harvard University." 

quality which made Holmes popular, despite his habit of 
keeping the floor and of saying admirably unanswerable 
things. 

Up to middle life Dr. Holmes's literary reputati' 
that of a poet whose work was chiefly social, 
his first publication, to be sure, "Old Ironsidt 
impromptu outburst of feeling," caused b-* 
newspaper that the old frigate "Constit 
destroyed. His fervent verses not r 
purpose of saving from destructior 
whose hulk still lies at the Char! 
have retained popularity. Few " 
American school-boys than th 
"Av, tear her tatte; 



332 The Renaissance of New England 



Most of Holmes's early verse, however, may be typified by 
the first stanza of "My Aunt": 

"My aunt! my dear unmarried aunt! 
Long years have o'er her flown; 
Yet still she strains the aching clasp 
That binds her virgin zone; 

"I know it hurts her — though she looks 
As cheerful as she can ; 
Her waist is ampler than her life, 
For life is but a span." 

Such verse as this, with its light good-humor and its reck- 
less pun, is of a sort which for want of a native English 
term we call vers de socitie. 

Of social verse in every sense of the word Holmes early 

showed himself a master; and to the end his mastery 

never relaxed. He wrote verses for almost every kind of 

occasion which demanded them. The occasions most 

^quent in their demands, however, were those which 

in the yearly life of Harvard College. Holmes was 

the most completely loyal Harvard man of his 

Both at the formal ceremonies of the college 

-nore intimate meetings of his college class 

dy called on for poems which he never 

whoever wishes to understand the tem- 

nnot do better than saturate himself 

"'^h Holmes has made part of the 

^f these recall the older traditions 

untly than the song he wrote for 

ary of the college in 1836: 



Oliver Wendell Holmes 333 

"And, when at length the College rose, 

The sachem cocked his eye 
At every tutor's meagre ribs 

Whose coat-tails whistled by : 
But when the Greek and Hebrew words 

Came tumbling from his jaws, 
The copper-colored children all 

Ran screaming to the squaws. 

"And who was on the Catalogue 

When college was begun ? 
Two nephews of the President, 

And Uic Professor's son ; 
(They turned a little Indian by, 

As brown as any bun ;) 
Lord! how the seniors knocked about 

The freshman class of one !" 

More characteristic of his riper years was an inimitable combina- 
combination of reckless fun and tender sentiment such as 1'°" °* ^ 

Pun and 

makes peculiarly his own the first verses of his poem for Tender- 
tlie " Meeting of the Alumni " in 1857 : 

" I thank you, Mr. President, you've kindly broke the ice ; 
Virtue should always be the first, — I'm only Second Vice — 
(A vice is something with a screw that's made to hold its jaw 
Till some old file has played away upon an ancient saw). 

" Sweet brothers by the Mother's side, the babes of days go 
All nurslings of her Juno breasts whose milk is never dr 
We come again, like half-grown boys, and gather at ' 
About her knees, and on her lap, and clinging roun 

" We find her at her stately door, and in her anc' 
Dressed in the robes of red and green she alv 
Her eye has all its radiant youth, her chee' 
We drop our roses as we go, hers flour' 

His class poemS; again^ tell of < 



^84 Tlie Renaissance of New England 

as nothing else can. Here is a random verse from one 
that lie made in 1867 : 

"So when upon the fated scroll 

The falling stars* have all descended, 
And, blotted from the breathing roll, 

Our little page of life is ended, 
We ask but one memorial line 

Traced on thy tablet, Gracious Mother : 
' My children. Boys of '29. 

In pace. How they loved each other ! '" 

And Holmes could speak for the new Harvard as well 
as for the old. In 1886, when the college celebrated its 
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Lowell delivered an 
oration and Holmes a poem. He was then an old man, 
addressed to a task of solemn dignity, and his verse lacked 
the vivacity which almost to that time had seemed peren- 
nial; but passages of it show him as sympathetic with the 
future as his older college verses show him with the past. 
Take, for example, the stirring lines in which he sets 
forth the conflict of Harvard with the ghost of Cal- 
vinism : 

"As once of old from Ida's lofty height 
The flaming signal flashed across the night, 
So Harvard's beacon sheds its unspent rays 
Till every watch-tower shows its kindling blaze. 
Caught from a spark and fanned by every gale, 
brighter radiance gilds the roofs of Yale; 
'^erst and Williams bid their flambeaus shine, 
iwdoin answers through her groves of pine ; 
'iceton's sands the far reflections steal, 
hty Edwards stamped his iron heel; 

Catalogue of Harvard, the names of the dead 

When the catalogues were still phrased in 

^ described by the quaintly barbarous term 



Oliver Wendell Holmes 335 

Nay, on the hill* where old beliefs were bound 
Fast as if Styx had girt them nine times round, 
Bursts such a light that trembling souls inquire 
If the whole church of Calvin is on fire ! 
Well may they ask, for what so brightly burns 
As a dry creed that nothing ever learns? 
Thus link by link is knit the flaming chain 
Lit by the torch of Harvard's hallowed plain." 

In the form taken by this most serious of his occasional Eight- 
poems there is something characteristic. The verse groups ^entu'r 
itself in memory with that of another poem, which he Manner, 
read at a dinner given in honor of Lowell's seventieth 
birthday. Holmes was ten years older, and Mr. Sidney 
Bartlett, the acknowledged leader of the Boston bar, was 
ten years older still. So Holmes made some whimsical 
allusion to Lowell's youth and then to his own maturity; 
and finally spoke of Bartlett, 

" The lion of the law ; 
All Court Street trembles when he leaves his den, 
Clad in the pomp of fourscore years and ten. " 

These lines were read on the 2 2d of February, 1889; yet 
if any student of English literature should be given that 
couplet by itself, he would probably guess it to be the work 
of some contemporary of Alexander Pope. The tr 
which appears here characterizes Holmes's occa'^' 
verse throughout. So able a critic as Mr. Stedman 
holds it to characterize all his poetry. In mr 
Holmes's temper was that of a bygone t' 
Stedman happily observes, his verse is r 
eighteenth-century literature, but rathe 

The more one considers Holmes's w 
♦Andover Hill. 



336 The Renaissance of New England 

the more significant one finds this criticism. Revivals 
of the eighteenth century — Henry Esmond, fol" example, 
or Mr. Dobson's essays — have been common enough in 
our own day. Indeed modern artists in general are quite 
as apt to express themselves in the- manner of some bygone 
age as in any spontaneously characteristic of their own 
time. Holmes, however, seems as far from artificial in 
manner as if he had flourished at a time which had an 
instinctively settled style of its own. That his manner 
proves so much in the spirit of the eighteenth century, 
accordingly, indicates something characteristic not only of 
the man, but of the world about him. For full fifty years, 
as we have seen, he rarely stirred from New England; no 
other writer lived under such completely local circum- 
stances. In view of this fact, his manner, so like that 
prevalent in English literature of a hundred years before, 
seems a fresh bit of evidence that the literary temper of 
America has lagged behind that of the mother country. 
The Boston where Holmes lived, however, and where 
for years he was so eminent a social figure, was the same 
Boston which was thrilling with all the fervid vagaries of 
our Renaissance. Deeply conservative in external temper, 
'oving social order, and distrusting vagaries of thought 
l of conduct alike, Holmes had small sympathy with 
xtravagances of Transcendentalism or of reform; but 
'^ not have been truly contemporary with these 
^ without catching something of their spirit. So 
^t he was what Mr. Stedman has called him, 
he eighteenth century, in another he was 
cee of the Renaissance, 
out him, he was seized with an impulse 
and to report it. What chiefly dis- 



Oliver Wendell Holmes 3,37 

tinguishes him from the rest is that they were essentially 
romantic. They were attracted by ideal philosophy and 
mediaeval ])oetry. History they found most stimulating 
and satisfying when it appealed to romantic emotion. 
In this they delighted with all the ardor of a race which 
for two hundred years had been aesthetically starved. 
America, however, had been poor in another range of 
human experience. Throughout Europe, the eighteenth 
century was a period of alert common sense, observing 
life keenly, commenting on it with astonishing wit, but Ration- 
generally regarding romantic emotion with distrust. And *^'^™- 
New England, when its Renaissance finally dawned, lacked 
not only the untrammelled romanticism of mediaeval 
tradition, but also the eager rationalism which had been 
the most characteristic trait of eighteenth-century Europe. 

This feature of the new learning Holmes found most 
congenial. In the form and spirit of his verse, as Mr. 
Stedman says, there is something which makes him a 
survival of the eighteenth century; and though the form 
of his prose is individual, its spirit seems as essentially 
that of the eighteenth century as if every line of his essays 
and novels had been thrown into heroic couplets. 

The first instalment of his final Autocrat of the Break- 
fast Table — revived after the casual interruption of twent^ 
five years — appeared in the first number of the Atla^ 
Monthly in the autumn of 1857. Within the next 
years Holmes produced four volumes of such essav 
Autocrat* three more or less formal novel' ' 

* The Professor at the Breakfast Table, i860; The Poc' 
Table, 1872; Pages from an Old Volume of Life, 18' 
Cups, 1 89 1. 

t Elsie Venner, 1861 ; The Guardian Angel, 1867; 



338 The Renaissance of New England 

cellent memoirs of Motley (1879) ^^d of Emerson (1885). 
Throughout this prose work of his maturity and his age, — 
he was nearly fifty years old when it began, — one feels the 
shrewd, swift, volatile mind of a witty man of the world. 
One feels, too, the temper of a trained though not very 
learned man of science, whose education and professional 
experience combined with native good sense to make him 
understand the value of demonstrable fact. One feels al- 
most as surely another trait. Holmes could not have been 
a Bostonian during those years of Renaissance when Bos- 
ton was the intellectual centre of America, without keen 
interest in something like mysticism ; but beyond any other 
New England man of his time Holmes treats mystical 
vagaries as only fancies, — beautiful, perhaps, and stimulat- 
ing, but inherently beyond the range of assertion as dis- 
tinguished from speculation. In one sense no Transcen- 
dentalist more constantly devoted himself to the task of 
proving all things and holding fast those which were good. 
From beginning to end, however, Holmes knew that things 
can truly be proved only by observation and experiment. 
So just as in our final view of the New England Renaissance 
Ticknor seems its most eminent scholar, Longfellow its 
most congenial poet, and Lowell its deepest humanist, 
so Holmes seems its one uncompromising rationalist. 
For this rationalism, in addition to the fact that he was 
^most hfelong student of science. Holmes had a deeply 
lal reason. His youth had been surrounded by 
■^est Calvinism, at a moment when the spiritual 
his native region was at last taking its enfran- 
ian form. The whole austerity of the old 
's stern limitation of intellectual and spir- 
ad been within his personal experience 



Oliver Wendell Holmes 339 

at the period of life when impressions sinlc deepest. He 
early developed the liberal and kindly rationalism so ad- 
mirably expressed in his personal and literary career. 
The dogmas of the elder creed, however, were seared into 
his brain; he could never quite forget them. And believ- 
ing them untrue, he never ceased his efforts to refute 
them. These attacks were sometimes indirect, as in Elsie 
Venner, or in many passages from his Breakfast Table 
series. In his essay on Edwards, and elsewhere, they 
were direct. 

So Holmes, the wittiest and happiest of New England 
social figures, the most finished as well as the most ten- Summary 
derly sentimental maker of our occasional verse, who wrote 
so much even of his most serious work with the temper 
and the manner of a wit, proves to have another aspect. 
Among our men of letters this rationalist was the most 
sturdy, the most militant, the most pitiless enemy of what he 
believed to be a superstition whose tyranny over his child- 
hood had left lifelong scars. That he never relaxed his 
fight shows rare courage. From beginning to end Holmes 
thus seems a survivor of the eighteenth century. Brave, 
rationalistic attack on outworn superstitions is the bravest 
note of that past epoch. 



XIV 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

References 

Works: Riverside Edition, 13 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1883. 

Biography and Criticism: Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne 
and His Wife, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1884; *Henry James, Haw- 
thorne, New York: Harpers, 1880 (eml); M. Conway, Lije of Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, London: Scott, 1890 (gw); *G. E. Woodberry, Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, Boston: Houghton, 1902 (aml); *L. E. Gates, Studies and 
Appreciations, New York: Macmillan, 1900, pp. 92-109. 

Bibliography: Conway's Hawthorne, i-xiii (at end); Foley, 117-121. 

Selections: *Carpenter, 221-243; Duyckinck, II, 507-511; Gris- 
wold, Prose, 472-482; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 177-214. 

In our study of the New England Renaissance we have 
glanced at Emerson, whom we may call its prophet; at 
Whittier, who so admirably phrased its aspirations for 
reform; at Longfellow, its academic poet; at Lowell, its 
humanist; and at Holmes, its rationalist. The period 
produced but one other literary figure of equal eminence 
with these, — Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804- 1864), above 
and beyond the others an artist. 
Life. Hawthorne came from a family eminent in early colonial 

days, but long lapsed into obscurity. His father, a ship 
captain of the period when New England commerce was 
most vigorous, died in Guiana when Hawthorne was only 
four years old ; and the boy, who had been born at Salem, 
grew up there in his mother's care, singularly solitary. 
In 182 1 he went to Bowdoin College, where he was a 

340 



Nathaniel Hawthorne 341 

classmate of Longfellow, and an intimate friend of Frank- 
lin Pierce, afterwards President of the United States. 

For fourteen years after his graduation from Bowdoin 
Hawthorne lived with his mother at Salem, so quietly that 
his existence was hardly known to the townsfolk of that 
gossipy little Yankee seaport. He spent much time in- 
doors, constantly writing, but neither successful nor gen- 
erally recognized as an author. He took long solitary 
walks, and his personal appearance is said to have been 
romantic and picturesque. In 1839 he was appointed a 
clerk in the Boston Custom House; in 1841 the spoils sys- 
tem turned him out of office, and for a few months he was 
at Brook Farm. The next year he married, and from then 
until 1846 he lived at Concord, writing and by this time rec- 
ognized as a writer of short stories. From 1846 to 1849 
he was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem. During 
the ensuing four years, when he resided at" various places 
in Massachusetts, he produced his three most character- 
istic long books — The Scarlet Letter, The House 0} the Seven 
Gables, and The Blithedale Romance — as well as his two 
volumes of mythological stories for children. The Wonder- 
Book and Tanglewood Tales. In 1853 President Pierce 
made him Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroad 
until i860, passing some time during his later stay there 
in Italy. From this experience resulted The Marble Faun. 
In i860 he came home and returned to Concord, where he 
lived thenceforth. 

Chronologically, Hawthorne's position in New Eng- chrono- 
land literature seems earlier than that of his contempo- p<fsUioa 
raries at whom we have glanced. He was only a year 
younger than Emerson, he was three years older than 
Longfellow and Whittier, five years older than Holmes, 



342 Tlie Renaissance of New England 

and fifteen years older than Lowell. He died during the 
Civil War; and Emerson and Longfellow survived until 
1882, Lowell till 1891, Whittier till 1892, and Holmes till 
1894. Though Hawthorne, however, was the first to die of 
this little company, he had been a fellow-writer with them 
during the thirty years when the full literary career of all 

had declared itself. In the 
time which followed H a w - 
thorne's death, the survivors 
wrote and published copiously; 
but none produced anything 
which much altered the reputa- 
tion he had achieved while 
Hawthorne was still alive. So 
far as character goes, in short, 
the literature of renascent New 
England was virtually complete 
in 1864. 

Under such circumstances 
^yfie^^ ^^^c<>^ion^^^ chronology becomes accidental. 
The order in which to consider 
contemporaries is a question simply of their relative char- 
acter. And we had good reason for reserving Hawthorne 
till the last; for above all the rest, as we have already 
remarked, he was an artist. His posthumously pubhshed 
note-books* show him freshly impressed almost every day 
with some aspect of life which aroused in him concrete 
reaction. He actually published tales enough to estabhsh 
more than one literary reputation, yet these note-books 

* Passages from the American Note-Books, 1868; Passages from the 
English Note-Books, 1870; Passages from the French and Italian Note- 
Books, 1871. 




Nathaniel Hawthorne 



343 



prove what a wealth of imaginative impulse he never 
coined into finished literary form. They reveal, too, an- 
other characteristic fact. Though Hawthorne wrote hardly 
any verse, he was a genuine poet. His only vehicle of 
expression was language, and to him language meant not 







AN EARLY HOME OF HAWTHORNE, OLD MANSE, CONCORD. 

only words but rhythm too. Hence, even in memoranda 
which he never expected to stray beyond his note-books, 
you feel the constant touch of one whose meaning is so 
subtle that its most careless expression must fall into 
delicately careful phrasing. 

Such a temperament would inevitably have declared 
itself anywhere. Some critics have accordingly lamented 
the accident which confined Hawthorne's experience for 
almost fifty years to isolated, aesthetically starved New 
England. In this opinion there is considerable justice. 
The extreme localism of Hawthorne's life, until his ma- 



ment. 



344 The Renaissance of New England 

turity was passing into age, may very likely have made 
world literature poorer. The Marble Faun is our only 
indication of what he might have done if his sensitive 
youth had been exposed to the unfathomably human in- 
fluence of Europe. Yet, whatever our loss, we can hardly 
regret an accident so fortunate to the literature of New 
England. 

Hawthorne, whose artistic temperament would have 
been remarkable anywhere, chanced to be born in an 
old Yankee seaport, then just at its zenith, but soon to 
be stricken by the Embargo, and swiftly to be surpassed 
by a more prosperous neighbor. From Salem he visited 
those woods of Maine which were still so primeval as to 
Environ- recall the shadowy forests whose mystery confronted the 
immigrant Puritans. Tlicn, just when Transcendental- 
ism was most in the air, he lived for a while in Boston, 
had a glimpse of Brook Farm, passed more than one 
year in the Old Manse at Concord, and finally strayed 
among the hills of Berkshire. Until he set sail for Eng- 
land, however, he had never known any earthly region 
which had not traditionally been dominated by the spirit 
of the Puritans; nor any which in his own time was not 
alive, so far as life was in it, with the spirit of the New 
England Renaissance. 

In considering this period, we have hitherto dwelt only 
on its most obvious aspect. Like any revelation of new 
life, it seemed to open the prospect of an inimitably ex- 
cellent future. Amid such buoyant hopes people think 
little of the past, tending indeed to regard it like some night 
of darkness to which at last the dawn has brought an end. 
They forget the infinite mysteries of the night, its terrors 
and its dreamy beauties, and the courage of those who 



Nathaniel Hawthorne 345 

throughout its tremulous course have watched and prayed. 
So when the dawn comes they forget that the birth of day 
is the death of night. Thus the men of our New England 
Renaissance forgot that their new, enfranchised life and what 
literature meant the final passing of that elder New Eng- ^^^ng 
land so hopefully founded by the Puritan fathers. As our wrote 
Renaissance has passed its swift zenith, and begun itself 
to recede into dimming memory, we can see more plainly 
than of old this tragic aspect of its earthly course. The 
world in which Hawthorne lived and wrote was not only a 
world where new ideals were springing into life, it was a 
world, too, where the old ideals were suffering their agony. 

Of all our men of letters Hawthorne was most sensitive 
to this phase of the time when they flourished together. 
He was not, like Emerson, a prophet striving to glean trutli 
from unexplored fields of eternity; he was not, like Whit- 
tier, a patient limner of simple nature, or a passionate 
advocate of moral reform; he was not, like Longfellow 
or Lowell, a loving student of world literature, moved by 
erudition to the expression of what meaning he had found 
in the records of a wonderful foreign past; he was not, like 
Holmes, a combatant who, with all the vivacity of lifelong 
wit and all the method of scientific training, rationally 
attacked the chimeras of his time; he was an artist, who 
lived for nearly fifty years only in his native country, daily 
stirred to attempt expression of what our Yankee life meant. 
Of all our men of letters he was the most indigenous. 

So a hasty comparison of his work with some which Haw- 
was produced in England during the same years may c^"^"^ 
help to define our notion of what the peculiar trait of pared with 
American letters has been. His first collection of Twice- h'^ cTn- 
told Tales appeared in 1837; in England, where Queen '^"^P^'a- 



346 The Renaissance of New England 

Victoria had just come to the throne, Dickens published 
Oliver Tivist, and Thackeray The Yellowplush Papers. 
The second series of Twice-told Tales came in 1842, when 
Bulwer pubhshed Zanoni, Dickens his American Notes, 
and Macaulay his Lays. In 1846, when Hawthorne pub- 
lished the Mosses jroni an Old Manse, Dickens published 
Donihey and Son. In 1850, the year of The Scarlet Letter, 
came Mrs. Browning's Sonnets jrom the Portuguese, Car- 
lyle's Latter-day Pamphlets, and Tennyson's In Memoriam; 
in 1851, along with The House 0} the Seven Gables, came 
Mrs. Browning's Casa Giiidi Windows and Ruskin's 
Stones of Venice; in 1852, with The Blithedale Romance, 
came Dickens's Bleak House, Charles Reade's Peg 
Woffingfon, and Thackeray's Henry Esmond; in 1853, 
along with Tangleivood Tales, came Kingsley's Hypatia, 
Bulwer's My Novel, and Miss Yonge's Heir 0} Redclyfje; 
and in the year of The Marble Faun (i860) came Wilkie 
Collins's The Woman in White, George Eliot's The Mill 
on the Floss, Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, 
and the last volume of Ruskin's Modern Painters. The 
list is long enough for our purpose. It shows that, like 
Irving and Poe, the two Americans who preceded him as 
literary artists, Hawthorne proves, the moment you com- 
pare him with the contemporary writers of England, to 
be gifted or hampered with a pervasive sense of form which 
one is half disposed to call classic. 

Yet that term "classic," applied even to Irving, and still 
more to Poe or Hawthorne, must seem paradoxical. Such 
terms as "romantic "and "classic "are bewildering; but for 
general purposes one would not go far wrong who should 
include under the term "classic" that sort of human im- 
pulse which reached its highest form in the fine arts of 



\ 



Nathaniel Hawthorne 



347 



Greece, and under the term "romantic" that which most 
nearly approached reahzation in the art and the hterature 
of mediaeval Europe. The essence of classic art is perhaps 
that the artist realizes the limits of his conception, and 
within those limits endeavors to make his expression com- 




WAYSIDE, CONCORD, HOME OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 



pletely beautiful. The essence of the romantic spirit is 
that the artist, whatever his conception, is always aware of 
the infinite mysteries which lie beyond it. 

Now, even the stories of Irving are pervaded with one The ro- 
kind of romantic temper — that which delights in the splen- sptdt' in 
dors of a vanished past, and in the mysteries of supernatural ^^""'y 

^ , . . American 

fancy. Something more deeply romantic underlies the Fiction, 
inarticulate work of Brockden Brown, and still more the 
poems and the tales of Poe. Both Brown and Poe had a 
profound sense of what horror may lurk in the mysteries 
which we call supernatural. Even Brown, however, and 
surely Poe, conceived these melodramatically. In common 



348 The Renaissance of New England 

with Irving and Poe, Hawthorne had an instinctive ten- 
dency to something like classic precision of form. In com- 
mon with them he possessed, too, a constant sensitiveness to 
the mysteries of romantic sentiment ; but the romanticism 
of Hawthorne differs from that of either Poe or Irving as 
distinctly as it differs from that of Brockden Brown. In 
Hawthorne's there is no trace of artificiality. Beyond 
human life he felt not only the fact of mystery — he felt the 
mysteries which are truly there. 

In the mere fact of romantic temper Hawthorne is 
broadly American, typically native to this new world 
Puritan- which has been so starved of antiquity. In the fact that 
Motive * ^^s romantic spirit is fundamentally true he proves indi- 
of Art. vidual, and more at one than our other artists with the 
ancestral spirit of New England. The darkly passion- 
ate idealism of the Puritans had involved a tendency 
towards conceptions which when they reached artistic 
form must be romantic. The phase of mystery on which 
the grim dogmas of these past generations incessantly 
dwelt lies in the world-old facts of evil and sin and suffer- 
ing. Now Hawthorne had strayed far from Puritan dogma. 
His nature, however, could never shake off the tempera- 
mental earnestness of the Puritans. Throughout his 
work, he is most characteristic when in endlessly varied 
form he expresses that constant, haunting sense of ances- 
tral sin in which his Puritan forefathers found endless 
warrant for their Calvinistic doctrines. With the Puri- 
tans, of course, this sense of sin was a conviction of fact ; 
Hawthorne, on the other hand, felt it only as a matter of 
emotional experience. To him Puritanism was no longer 
a motive of life; in final ripeness it had become a motive 
of art. 



science. 



Nathaniel Hawthorne 34-9 

Another aspect of this deep sense of sin and mystery Haw- 
shows us that it involves morbid development of conscience. ArtisIL^ 
Conscience in its artistic form Hawthorne displays through- Con- 
out ; and though artistic conscience be very different from 
moral, the two have in common an aspiration toward 
beauty. For all its perversities of outward form, the im- 
pulse of the moral conscience is really toward beauty of 
conduct; artistic conscience is a persistent, strenuous im- 
pulse toward beauty of expression. The Hterature of Amer- 
ica has shown this latter trait more frequently than that of 
England; one feels it even in Brockden Brown, one feels 
it strongly in Irving and Poe, one feels it in the delicately 
sentimental lines of Bryant, and one feels it now and 
again through most of the expression of renascent New 
England. Whatever American writers have achieved, they 
have constantly tried to do their best. Hawthorne, we have 
seen, surpassed his countrymen in the genuineness of his 
artistic impulse; he surpassed them, too, in the tormenting 
insistence of his artistic conscience. In his choice of words 
and, above all, in the delicacy of his very subtle rhythm, 
he seems never to have relaxed his effort to write as beauti- 
fully as he could. Thus he displays the ancestral con- 
science of New England in finally exquisite form. 

Of course he has limits. Comparing his work with 
the contemporary work of England, one is aware of 
its classically careful form, of its profoundly romantic 
sentiment, and of its admirable artistic conscience. One 
grows aware, at the same time, of its unmistakable rus- 
ticity; in turns of thought as well as of phrase one feels 
monotony, provincialism, a certain thinness. These lim- 
its, however, prove, like his merits, to be deeply character- 
istic of the New England which surrounded his hfe. 



^ •/ 



350 TJie Renaissance of New England 

Summary. It IS hard to sum up the impression which such a writer 
makes. He was ideal, of course, in temper; he was intro- 
spective, with all the self-searching instinct of his ancestry; 
he was solitary; he was permeated with a sense of 
the mysteries of life and sin; and by pondering over 
them he tended to exaggerate them more and more. In 
a dozen aspects he seems typically Puritan. His artis- 
tic conscience, however, as alert as that of any pagan, 
impelled him constantly to realize in his work those forms 
which should most beautifully embody the ideals of his 
incessantly creative imagination. Thus he grew to be of 
all our writers the least imitative, the most surely individ- 
ual. The circumstances of his life combined with the 
sensitiveness of his nature to make his individuahty in- 
digenous. Beyond any one else he expresses the deep- 
est temper of that New England race which brought him 
forth, and which now, at least in the phases we have 
known, seems vanishing from the earth. 

When we ask what that race has contributed to human 
expression, we must not let our patriotism betray our judg- 
ment. The literature of New England is not supremely 
great. Of the men we have scrutinized Emerson and 
^/V. Hawthorne seem the most memorable. And Emerson 
has vagaries which may well justify a doubt whether his 
work is among those few final records of human wisdom 
which are imperishable Scriptures. i\nd, though Haw- 
thorne's tales possess sincerity of motive and beauty of 
form, they reveal at best a phase of human nature whose 
limits are obvious. As we look back at the New England 
now fading into the past, however, we find in it, if not 
positive magnitude of achievement, at least qualities which 
go far to warrant the national pride in its utterances which 



Nathaniel Hawthorne 351 

we have loved to believe justified. For throughout, its 
literature is sincere and pure and sweet. 

The emigrants to New England were native Elizabeth- 
ans, — stern and peculiar, but still temperamentally con- 
temporary with Shakspere and the rest. In two centuries 
and a half, national experience forced English life and 
letters through many various phases, until at last the old 
country began to breed that fixed, conservative John Bull 
who has so lost Elizabethan spontaneity, versatility, and 
enthusiasm. In America, meantime, national inexperi- 
ence kept the elder temper little changed until at the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth century it was aroused by 
the world-movement of revolution. Then, at last, our 
ancestral America, which had so unwittingly lingered be- 
hind the mother country, awoke. In the flush of its waking, 
it strove to express the meaning of life; and the meaning 
of its life was the story of what two hundred years of na- 
tional inexperience had wrought for a race of Elizabethan 
Puritans. Its utterances may well prove lacking in scope, 
in greatness; the days to come may well prove them of 
little lasting power; but nothing can obscure their beautiful 
purity of spirit. 

For all its inexperience. New England life has been 
human. Its literal records are no more free than those of 
other regions and times from the greed and the lust, the 
trickery and the squalor, which everywhere defile earthly 
existence. What marks it apart is the childlike persist- 
ency of its ideals. Its nobler minds, who have left their 
records in its literature, retained something of the old spon- 
taneity, the old versatility, the old enthusiasm of ancestral 
England. They retained, too, even more than they knew 
of that ardor for absolute truth which animated the crave 



352 Tlie Renaissance of New England 

fathers of the emigration. Their innocence of worldly 
wisdom led them to undue confidence in the excellence 
of human nature; the simplicity of their national past 
blinded them to the complexity of the days even now at 
hand, while the sod still hes light on their graves. We 
used to believe them heralds of the future; already we 
begin to perceive that they were rather chroniclers of times 
which shall be no more. Yet, whatever comes, they pos- 
sessed traits for which we may always give them unstinted 
reverence; for humanity must always find inspiring the 
record of bravely confident aspiration toward righteous- 
ness. 



BOOK VI 
THE REST OF THE STORY 



BOOK VI 
THE REST OF THE STORY 

I 

NEW YORK SINCE 1857 

References 

Works: Bayard Taylor's Lije and Poetical Works, 6 vols., Boston: 
Houghton; Travels, 11 vols., New York: Putnam, 1850-1889; 
Novels, 5 vols.. New York: Putnam, 1862-1872. George William 
Curtis's works are published by the Harpers; his speeches (3 vols., New 
York: Harpers, 1894) have been edited by Charles Eliot Norton. The 
works of contemporary New York authors, not yet collected, are in print 
and readily accessible. 

Biography and Criticism: Bayard Taylor's Lije and Letters, ed. Marie 
Hansen-Taylor and H. E. Scudder, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1884; 
A. H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor, Boston: Houghton, 1896 (aml); Ed- 
ward Cary, George William Curtis, Boston: Houghton, 1894 (aml); 
Mrs. James T. Fields, Charles Dudley Warner, New York: McClure, 
Phillips & Co., 1904. For biographies of other New York writers, see 
the various dictionaries of American biography. For reviews and criti- 
cisms, see Poole's Index. For lists of titles and dates, see Whitcomb 
or Foley. 

Long as we have dwelt on the Renaissance of New 
England, we can hardly have forgotten that the first con- 
siderable American literary expression developed in the 
Middle States. To that region we must now turn again. 
The Atlantic Monthly, v^t remember, was started in 1857. 
That same year saw also the foundation of Harper's Weekly 
in New York. At that time Harper's New Monthly Mag- 

355 



356 The Best of the Story 

azine had been in existence for seven years ; and the two 
New York newspapers which have maintained closest 
relation with literary matters, the Evening Post and the 
Tribune, had long been thoroughly established. The other 
periodicals which now mark New York as the literary cen- 
tre of the United States were not yet founded. So in 
turning to New York once more we may conveniently 
revert to 1857. 

That year was marked throughout America by financial 
panic. The great expansion of the country had resulted 
in a general extension of credit and in a general overde- 
velopment of enterprises, particularly of railroads, which 
was bound to involve reaction. For a little while material 
progress came to a standstill. It was only when material 
Commer- progrcss was renewed, partly under the stimulus of the 
Civil War, that the overwhelming superiority of. New 
York as a centre of material prosperity made itself finally 
fch. 

Yet, throughout the century, the preponderance of New 
York had been declaring itself. In 1800 it had 60,000 in- 
habitants to only 24,000 in Boston. In 1830, when it had 
200,000 inhabitants, Boston had only 61,000; and by 
1857 the population of New York was at least three-quar- 
ters of a million, while that of Boston still proportionally 
lagged behind. From the time when the Erie Canal was 
opened, in fact, the geographical position of New York 
had already made that city by far the most considerable 
in America. Less than three hundred miles from Boston, 
it was and it remains as central as Boston is isolated. 

New York, however, has never been a political 
capital. In this respect its contrast with Boston is most 
marked. Though Boston has been the capital only of 



cial Im 
portance 



■New York Since 1857 357 

the small State of Massachusetts, this small State has 
always been the most important of isolated New England. 
Boston has accordingly enjoyed not only the commercial 
and economic supremacy of the region, but also such su- 
premacy as comes from attracting and diffusing the most 
important influences of local public life. In this aspect 
Boston on a small scale resembles the great capitals of the 
world. New York, on the other hand, commercially and 
financially the most important spot in America, has never 
been much else. It has always had to seek legislation 
from a much smaller city more than a hundred miles away; 
and thither it has always had to take for decision every 
question carried to its court of highest appeal. Two 
natural results have followed. In the absence of far- 
reaching political activity, emphasis on merely local poli- 
tics has been disproportionate; and meanwhile the city. Material 
which has prospered only from such preponderatingly character, 
material causes, has appeared excessively material in 
general character. 

New York has consequently lacked, and perhaps must 
always lack, some of those advantages which make a true 
capital intellectually stimulating. Its extraordinary growth 
has nevertheless brought into being there something more 
like metropolitan life than has yet existed elsewhere in 
America. Material development on so vast a scale cannot 
help involving intellectual activity. New York has ac- 
cordingly developed not only material prosperity, but also 
higher life. From the moment when the Renaissance of 
New England began to decline. New York has more and 
more certainly been asserting itself as the intellectual and 
artistic centre of America. 

For many years our principal publishers have been 



858 Tie Best of the Story 

centred there; so have the periodicals which are most 
generally read throughout the country. Putnam's Monthly 
Magazine, begun in 1853, is now no more; but during its 
memorable existence it counted among its contributors the 
chief American writers of its time. Harper's Magazine, 
which dates from 1850, is still full of hfe; and so are 
Harper's Weekly, which dates from 1857; and the Cen- 
tury Magazine, founded as Scribner's Monthly in 1870, 
Periodicals, and translated to its present name in 188 1; 2irv6. Scribner' s 
Magazine, founded in 1887; and more. Some twenty 
years ago the old North American Review was bought by 
New York people and its title transferred there to a monthly 
periodical of less severe character than the old quarterly 
so dear to New England tradition. In New York are 
published the chief American weekly papers which seri- 
ously discuss public and literary affairs, The Nation and 
The Outlook; and there are comic weeklies as well, — Puck 
and Lije, and more. The list might go on endlessly ; but 
for our purposes this is enough. The literary activity in- 
volved in such production is incalculably greater than 
New England ever dreamed of. 

All the same, this activity has been distinguished from 
the literary activity of renascent New England in two rather 
marked ways. The first is that, in spite of its magnitude, 
it is less conspicuous in New York than the old North 
American Review or even the Dial, and still more than the 
earlier volumes of the A tlantic Monthly were in their con- 
temporary Boston. As one looks back at Boston between 
1800 and 1864, one inclines to feel that its intellectual 
life was rather more important than its material, and that 
even on the spot this intellectual importance was appreci- 
ated. In New York, however important our contemporary 



New York Since 1857 359 

literary expression, material activity is more important 
still. The second way in which literary New York may 
be distinguished from our elder literary Boston is that con- 
temporary letters in New York have become oddly im- 
personal. You know the names of publishers, you know 
the names of magazines, but in general you have rather 
vague notions of who is writing. 

Among those who have most influenced literary activity Greeley, 
under these circumstances was a man who himself was 
not precisely a man of letters. Horace Greeley (i8ii- 
1872) came to New York as a poor country boy in 1831; 
by 1 841 he had established the Tribune and become its 
editor. He is best remembered in his later years when 
the Tribune was politically an uncompromising advocate 
of reform. After the triumph of antislavery, Greeley 
finally turned his wrath against the corrupt politics in the 
Republican party, a party of which he had previously 
been a fervent, if candid, friend. His public career 
closed with his unsuccessful candidacy for the Presidency 
against Grant in 1872. His actual books are miscellaneous: 
The American Conflict, 1864-66; Recollections 0} a Busy 
Life, 1868; What I know of Farming, 1871. The most 
definitely remembered of his utterances is his frequent 
advice to youth who sought success: "Go West, young 
man; go West." This pronounced, eccentric temper, 
which somewhat grotesquely combined simplicity and 
shrewdness, seems remote from literature. But, all the 
while that the Tribune politically expounded extreme 
reform, it remained, in its relation to literary criticism, 
vigorously orthodox. 

Greeley naturally sympathized with many of the New 
England men at whom we have glanced. At one time o' 



360 The Rest of the Story 

another he invited their co-operation with the Tribune 
and thus helped to bring to New York a number of mem- 
orable literary people. Charles Anderson Dana was long 
on the staff of the Tribune, and so was George William 
Curtis. For a year or two Margaret Fuller was in charge 
of the Tribune^ s literary criticism; she was followed by 
George Ripley, who continued the work all his life. Nor 
did the Tribune draw its literary strength only from New 
England. The list of familiar names, by no means limited 
to those of New "England origin, might extend indefinitely. 
However long or short, it would certainly include the 
name of Bayard Taylor, whose career fairly represents the 
condition of New York letters during the period imme- 
diately following the Knickerbocker School. 
Bayard Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was a Pcnnsylvaniah, 

born of Quaker parentage. He had only a common- 
school education, but he loved literature, and by the time 
he was sixteen years old he was publishing poems in local 
newspapers. At nineteen he had attracted the attention of 
men of letters and had been associated with Greeley in one 
of the journalistic ventures which preceded the Tribune. 
So in 1844 Taylor brought out a volume of poems; and 
in the same year he was commissioned by the Tribune to 
go abroad and write home letters of travel. He spent two 
years in strolling through Europe on foot. The records 
of this journey began those books of travel which he con- 
tinued publishing for thirty years. Meanwhile he gave 
lectures, wrote for the Tribune, and brought out many 
volumes of poems and novels; and in 1871 he published 
a translation of Goethe's Faust in the original metres. 
An elaborate life of Goethe, which he had planned, 
vas fatally prevented. Appointed Minister to Germany 



Taylor. 



New Y'ork Since 1857 mi 

by President Hayes, he died soon after his arrival at Ber- 
lin. 

Taylor's most meritorious work is his translation of 
Faust. He put before himself the task of reproducing the 
original metres, and so far as possible the original rhymes, 
of that extremely complex poem. The result in nowise re- 
sembles normal EngHsh; but he never undertook to turn 
Faust into an Enghsh poem; his object was rather to re- 
produce in Enghsh words the effect made upon his mind 
by prolonged, sympathetic, enthusiastic study of the Ger- 
man masterpiece. Whatever the positive value of his 
translation, he achieved the rare practical result of indicat- 
ing the power and beauty of Goethe's style, as well as of 
his meaning. So if in years to come Taylor's memory 
survives it will probably be for this achievement in which 
he made no attempt at originality. ' * 

It is hardly an accident that the man of letters who, 
since Taylor's time, has been the most eminent in New 
York, should also have done much of his journahstic 
work in connection with the Tribune. Edmund Clar- stedman. 
ENCE Stedman (1833-), born at Hartford, Connecticut, 
went for a while to Yale, later became a journalist, and still 
later a broker, in New York. His publications include 
a wide variety of admirable poems, finally collected in 
1897 ; two masterly anthologies — the Victorian, published 
in 1895, and the American, pubhshed in 1900; critical 
works which have done more than those of any other 
living American to stimulate appreciative delight in 
poetry; and that Library 0} American Literature which 
must long remain the standard book of reference for all 
students of the subject. 

Considerable as this literary work must always seem, 



362 The Rest of the Story 

however, it is by no means the sum of Mr. Stedman's ser- 
vice to literature in America during the past thirty years. 
Few men have ever enjoyed a temperament more gen- 
uinely and widely friendly. On the one hand, he has 
been the constant and helpful friend of almost every one 
who has achieved literary recognition. On the other hand, 
he has been to unobtrusive aspirants for such recognition, 
a patient and affectionate counsellor. His eager com- 
mendation of all that is good, his gentle correction, of 
error, and his sturdy impatience of folly will make him, in 
the memory of all who have had the happiness to know 
him, the embodiment of stimulating literary friendship. 

It would be pleasant to dwell longer here. But we must 
return to the Tribune, from which, in a measure, Stedman 
started. From the Tribune there also started the virtual 
founders of two other conspicuous journals. Charles 
Anderson Dana (1819-1897), one of the original Brook 
Farmers, joined the Tribune in 1847, resigned in 1862 to 
become Assistant Secretary of War, and in 1868 assumed 
the direction of the Sun. From this time until his death, 
Dana's position was one of great power. But the reckless 
personality of his journalistic methods — in startling con- 
trast with the gentle idealism of his earlier life — isolated 
him from many old friends. To one ideal he remained 
constant. The Sun was always admirably written. Be- 
sides his journahstic work, Dana wrote a life of Grant 
and two volumes of recollections of the Civil War. Con- 
cerning Henry Jarvis Raymond (1820-1869) it is suf- 
ficient to remember that, after assisting Greeley on the 
Tribune, he established the Times in 1851, and conducted 
it with marked ability as long as he lived. 

A third journalist on whom any such consideration as 



New York Since 1857 363 

ours must touch was of different origin. Edwin Law- 
rence GoDKiN (1831-1900) was born in Ireland, grad- Godkin. 
uated from Queen's College, Belfast, and studied law at 
the Middle Temple, London. He travelled in the United 
States in 1856, was admitted to the New York bar in 1858, 
and was correspondent for a London newspaper during " 
the Civil War. In 1865 he became editor of the Nation; 
in 1866, its proprietor. His editorial work here, and his 
separately published studies of American government, — 
Problems of Modern Democracy, 1896; and Unjoreseen 
Tendencies 0} Democracy, 1898, — show great wisdom and 
remarkable mastery of style and structure. By birth, 
however, Godkin was not American, but Irish. And, 
for all the excellence of his intentions, it is doubtful 
whether he ever quite understood the real temper of that 
democracy which he strove so earnestly to chasten. 

To return once more to the Tribune, it was through this 
paper that some of the chief magazine writers of New 
York made their beginning. None of them has been more 
influential than George William Curtis (1824-1892). curtis. 
After Brook Farm and some foreign travel, Curtis settled in 
New York, where he wrote for the Tribune, edited Pul- 
nam's Magazine, Sind finally,in 1853, took the "Easy Chair'* 
of Harper^s Monthly, for which he thereafter wrote con- 
stantly until his death. His published works include 
three volumes of essays From the Easy Chair (1892, 1893, 
1894), some less important novels and books of travel, 
and three large volumes of speeches. Speeches and essays 
alike show Curtis to have been equally graceful and earnest 
in advocating social and political reforms. Of all the 
New England reformers, he was perhaps the least 
distorted. He ripened to the end ; he never really changed. 



364 The Rest of the Storij 

The "Easy Chair" of Harper's Monthly, left vacant by 
the death of Curtis, was next occupied by Charles Dud- 
ley Warner (1829-1900), who, in addition to these edi- 
torial essays, wrote some charming sketches of out-door 
life, volumes of travel, an excellent biography of Wash- 
ington Irving, and several novels. Neither Warner's re- 
serve nor his preoccupation with social problems blunted 
his humor or spoiled his simplicity of heart; but he 
never achieved a masterpiece. 

Another New York editor of importance was Dr. Josiah 
Gilbert Holland (i 819-1888). He was born in western 
Massachusetts. He took his medical degree at a small 
college in Pittsfield; he was a contributor to the Knick- 
erbocker; he was for a time Superintendent of Pub- 
lic Schools in Missouri; and in 1849 ^^ became editor 
of the Springfield Republican. With this paper he re- 
tained his connection for seventeen years, at the end of 
which, partly through his shrewd agency, the Springfield 
Republican had become widely influential. In 1870 
he became editor of Scribner's Monthly, which later 
took the name of the Century and of which he remained 
in charge until his death. Dr. Holland was not only a 
respectable and successful journalist, but a welcome lec- 
turer on various social topics, and the writer of numerous 
books. Among these were a popular Life oj Lincoln 
(1865); three or four novels which had considerable 
success, and some poems which appealed to a large, 
uncritical public. His most characteristic writings, how- 
ever, were didactic essays, the most successful of which 
were the series entitled Timothy TitcomVs Letters to 
Young People (1858). Dr. Holland's work is saved from 
indignity by its apparent unconsciousness of limitation. 



New York Since 1857 305 

His honesty, his kindness, and his sound moral sense 
endeared him to every-day people, and did much to 
strengthen homely ideals. 

Dr. Holland's successor as editor of the Century GiWer. 
was Richard Watson Gilder (1844-). Besides con- 
trolling the Century with marked skill, Mr. Gilder has 
found time to publish several volumes of very carefully 
finished verses and to interest himself in various causes 
of reform. Among the men of letters still flourishing in 
New York, his eminence both as an editor and as a poet 
combine with his graceful culture to make him an admira- 
ble exponent of sound literary tradition. 

The great mass of material which has appeared during 
the last forty years in the magazines thus ably edited, has 
not infrequently included serious essays and popular ex- 
positions of technical scholarship. One or two writers schoiar- 
of such matter must serve us for examples of a numerous ^ '^' 
and respectable group. 

Richard Grant White (1821-1885), after trying other wmte. 
occupations, settled down, before he was twenty-five 
years old, as a professional critic. With no very special 
training, he produced an edition of Shakspere, and two 
or three books on the English language. He had 
a fondness meanwhile for anonymous writing; so for 
some time he was not recognized as the author of the New 
Gospel of Peace (1863-66). In burlesque scriptural style, 
it attacked the so-called "Copperheads," who denied the 
constitutional right of the Federal Government to main- 
tain the Union by force. Thus a clever and versatile 
critical journalist, who sincerely and ardently assumed 
the authority of a serious scholar, came nearest to 
success in an irreverent political satire. 



366 



The Best of the Story 



Matthews. 



Wood- 
berry. 



Mahan. 



Fiction. 



Bunner. 



To come to living men, Brander Matthews (1852-) 
was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He graduated 
from Columbia University, where he is now Professor 
of Dramatic Literature. He has published, in addition 
to short stories in magazines, some excellent books on the 
novel and on the drama. George Edward Woodberry 
(1855-), a native of Massachusetts, and a graduate of 
Harvard, was for many years a professor at Columbia. 
During all this time he has been constantly engaged in 
serious literary work. He has won acknowledged dis- 
tinction as a teacher, a critic, and a poet; and his 
biographies of Poe and of Hawthorne are the best 
we have. 

Nor has scholarship in New York confined itself to lit- 
erary matters. To go no further, New York is the 
home of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-), whose 
works on naval history are recognized as authoritative 
everywhere. 

Our present concern, however, is chiefly with litera- 
ture, as distinguished from history or other scholarship. 
To return to recent magazines, the most popular part 
of their contents has consisted not of essays or severer 
studies, but of fiction in the form of short stories or serial 
novels. The writers of this fiction are so numerous and 
so even in merit that a few names must serve here to rep- 
resent many. Two deUghtful writers of this group are 
no more. Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855-1896), for 
years editor of Puck, was so busy a journalist that only 
persistent efforts gave him time for any but his regular 
work. The verses and stories which he left are therefore 
only a tantalizing token of what might have been had 
he had more leisure, or had he been spared beyond 



New York Since 1857 367 

early middle life. His apparently ephemeral work, how- 
ever, is memorably sympathetic, sensitive, and winning. 
Frank Richard Stockton (1834-1903), among whose Stockton, 
many stories are Rudder Grange (1879) and The Lady or 
the Tiger (1884), was notable for his calmly ingenious man- 
agement of fantastically impossible plots and situations. 
And we might easily recall other pleasant writers pre- 
maturely gone. 

Among those still living are many on whom we might 
linger. But we can glance now at only two or three. 
Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-), ^or example, Mrs. Bur- 
whose Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) had international 
success, set fashions in children's clothes, and almost 
added a new figure to literary tradition, is a remarkably 
skilful writer of readable narrative. Richard Harding 
Davis (1864-), author of books of travel, short stories of Davis. 
New York life, and some successful novels, combines the 
instinctive insight of a born journalist with the practical 
skill of an invariably readable writer of fiction. And of all 
the novelists who have lately appeared in New York, Mrs. 
Edith Wharton (186 2-) is the most remarkable. For Mrs. 
some time she was known only as an occasional writer of 
exquisitely finished verse, and of stories in which a power 
of analysis similar to that of Henry James was combined 
with almost Gallic precision of effect. In 1902 appeared 
her only long novel. The Valley 0} Decision. This re- 
markable study of Itahan life during the last years of the 
eighteenth century is among the few books which seem 
better each time you open it. Nothing written in America 
shows more vivid power of imagination, more firm grasp 
of subject, more punctihous mastery of style, or more 
admirably pervasive artistic conscience. 



3G8 The Rest of the Story 

We must hasten on. We have glanced at two of the 
forms which seem growing to hterary ripeness in New 

■r,,.' , York — the newspaper and the popular magazine. There is 

only one other form whose present popularity in America is 
The stage, anything like so considerable ; this is the stage. So far, to 
be sure, the American theatre has produced no work which 
can claim literary consideration. During the last half-. 
century, on the other hand, the American stage has de- 
veloped all over the country a popularity and an organi- 
zation which seem favorable to literary prospects. At 
the beginning of this century there were very few 

theatres in the United States; to-day travelhng dramatic 

companies patrol the continent. Every town has its 
theatre, and every theatre its audience. Until now, to be 
sure, the plays most popular in America have generally 
come straight from Europe, and the plays made here have 
been apt unintelligently to follow European models. Now 
and again, however, there have appeared signs that various 
types of American character could be represented on the 
stage with great popular effect; and the rapid growth of 
the American theatre has provided us with an increasing 
• number of skilful actors. A large though thoughtless 
public of theatre-goers, a school of professional actors 
who can intelligently present a wide variety of character, 
and a tendency on the part of American theatrical men to 
produce, amid stupidly conventional surroundings, vivid 
studies from life, again represent conditions of promise. 
If a dramatist of commanding power should arise in this 
country, he might find ready more than a few of the con- 
ditions from which lasting dramatic literatures have flashed 
into existence. • 

The stage, of course, though centred in New York, is 



New York Since 1857 369 

by no means limited to that city. Nor is New York the 
only region in the Middle States where literature has grown 
during the past thirty years. Philadelphia, during that Phiiadei- 
period, has contributed to American letters several names ^^^' 
which cannot be neglected. George Henry Boker 
(1823-1890) was a dramatic poet, whose work, begun 
so long ago as 1847, is still worth reading. Mr. Henry 
Charles Lea's (182 5-) works on ecclesiastical history 
are important and authoritative. Dr. Horace Howard 
FuRNESs's (1833-) variorum edition of Shakspere is the 
most comprehensive and satisfactory setting forth which 
has ever been made of the plays with which he has dealt. 
Dr. Weir Mitchell (1830-) who is among the most emi- 
nent of American physicians, has produced during his 
later years poems and novels which would have given him 
fame by themselves. And Mr. Owen Wister's (i860-) 
stories of Western life are likely to become the permanent 
record in Hterature of a passing epoch in our national life. 
Every one of the writers at whom we have now glanced 
may perhaps prove in years to come worthy of more at- 
tention than it has been in our power, as contemporaries, 
to bestow. Doubtless, too, we might have touched on 
many more; but these would only have emphasized the 
truth which must long ago have forced itself upon us. 
This contemporary writing is too near us for confident 
summary. All we can surely say is that our Middle Summary. 
States, as they used to be called, are now dominated 
by New York. This town, whose domination for the 
moment is not only local but national, owes its pre- 
dominance to that outburst of material force which 
throughout the victorious North followed the period of 
the Civil War. What may come of it no one can tell. 



370 The Rest of the Story 

Hardly anything about it is as yet distinct. There is, 
however, one exception. The Middle States, and to a 
great degree the city of New York itself, produced one 
eccentric literary figure, who has emerged into an isola- 
tion sometimes believed eminent. This is Walt Whitman. 



II 

WALT WHITMAN 

References 

Works: Leaves of Grass, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; 
Complete Prose Works, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; Com- 
plete Writings, Camden Edition, 10 vols., New York: Putnam, 1902. 

Biography and Criticism: John Burroughs, Whitman (Vol. X of 
Burroughs's Works, Riverside Edition, Boston: Houghton, 1896); Sted- 
man. Poets of America, chap, x; *R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies 
of Men and Books; *William Clarke, Wall Whitman, New York: Mac- 
millan, 1892; *H. L. Traubel and others, In re Wall Whitman, Phila- 
delphia: McKay, 1893. 

Bibliography: Foley, 307-310. 

Selections: *Carpenter, 389-402; Griswold, Poets, 626-627; Sted- 
man, 221-232; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 501-513. 

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was almost exactly con- 
temporary with Lowell. No two lives could have been 
much more different. Lowell, the son of a minister, closely 
related to the best people of New England, lived amid the Life, 
gentlest academic and social influences in America. Whit- 
man was the son of a carpenter and builder on the out- 
skirts of Brooklyn; the only New England man of letters 
equally humble in origin was Whittier. 

The contrast between Whitman and Whittier, however, 
is almost as marked as that between Whitman and Lowell. 
Whittier, the child of a Quaker farmer in the Yankee coun- 
try, grew up and lived almost all his life amid guileless in- 
fluences Whitman, born of the artisan class in a region 
close to the largest and most corrupt centre of popula- 

371 



372 The Rest of the Story 

tion on his native continent, had a rather vagrant youth 
and manhood. At times he was a printer, at times a 
school-master, at times editor of stray country newspapers, 
and by and by he took up his father's trade of carpenter 
and builder. Meanwhile he had rambled about the coun- 
try and into Canada; but in general until past thirty years 
old, he was apt to be near the East River. The New 
York thus familiar to him was passing, in the last days of 
the Knickerbocker School, into its metropolitan existence. 
The first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass appeared 
in 1855, the year which produced the Knickerbocker Gal- 
lery. 

During the Civil War he served devotedly as an army 
nurse. After the war, until 1873, he held some small 
Government clerkships at Washington. In 1873 a paralytic 
stroke brought his active life to an end ; for his last twenty 
years he lived an invalid at Camden, New Jersey. 

Until 1855, when the first edition of Leaves oj Grass 
appeared in a thin folio, some of which he set up with his 
own hands. Whitman had not declared himself as a man of 
letters. From that time to the end he was constantly 
publishing verse, which from time to time he collected in 
increasing bulk under the old title. He published, too, 
some stray volumes of prose, — Democratic Vistas (1871), 
Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), and the like. 
Prose and poetry alike seem full of a conviction that he had 
a mission to express and to extend the spirit of democracy, 
which he believed characteristic of his country. Few 
men have ever cherished a purpose more literally 
popular. Yet it is doubtful whether any man of letters in 
this country ever appealed less to the masses. 

Beyond question Whitman had remarkable individuality 



Walt Whitman 



373 



and power. Equally beyond question he was among the 

most eccentric individuals who ever put pen to paper. 

The natural result of this has been that his admirers have 

admired him intensely; while whoever has found his work 

repellent has found it irritating. Particularly abroad, 

however, he has attracted much critical attention; and 

many critics have been disposed 

to maintain that his formless 

prophecies of democracy are 

deeply characteristic of America. 

The United States, they point 

out, are professedly the most 

democratic country in the world; 

Whitman is professedly the most 

democratic of American writers; 

consequently he must be the 

most typical. 

The abstract ideal of democra- 
cy has never been better summed 
up than in the well-known watch- 
words of republican France : Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 
In the progress of American democracy, however, one of Democ- 
these ideals has been more strenuously kept in mind than ^^'^^' 
the other two. Practical democracy in America has been 
chiefly inspired by the ideal of liberty. The theoretical 
democracy prevalent in Europe, on the other hand, has 
tended rather to emphasize the ideal of fraternity, and, 
still more, the principle of human equality. And this 
ideal of equality, carried to logical extreme, asserts all 
superiority, all excellence, to be a phase of evil. 

Now, Walt Whitman's gospel of democracy certainly 
included liberty and laid strong emphasis on fraternity. 




^!;^~/^?^&^uz.^ 



374 The Rest of the Storij 

The ideal which most appealed to him, however, was that 
of equality. Though he would hardly have assented to 
such orthodox terms, his creed seems to have been that, 
as God made everything, one thing is just as good as 
another. This dogma of equality clearly involves a trait 
which has not yet been generally characteristic of Ameri- 
can thought or letters, — a complete confusion of values. 
In the early days of Renaissance in New England, to be 
sure, Emerson and the rest, dazzled by the splendors of 
a new world of art and literature, made small distinction 
between those aspects of it which are excellent and those 
which are only stimulating. At the same time they ad- 
hered as firmly as the Puritans themselves to the ideal of 
excellence; and among the things with which they were 
really familiar they pretty shrewdly distinguished those 
which were most valuable, either on earth or in heaven. 
With Walt Whitman, on the other hand, everything is 
confused. 

Take, for example, a passage from his "Song of 
Myself," which contains some of his best-known phrases: 

"A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; 
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any 
more than he. 

"I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green 
stuff woven. 

"Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, 
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, 
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may 
see and remark, and say Whose? 

"Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of vege- 
tation. 



Walt Whitman 375 

"Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, 
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones. 
Growing among black folds as among white, 

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuflf, I give them the same, 
I receive them the same. 

"And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. 

"Tenderly will I use you, curling grass. 
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, 
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, 
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon 

out of their mothers' laps, 
And here you are the mothers' laps. 

"The grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers. 
Darker than the colorless beards of old men. 
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths." 

Here is perhaps his best-known phrase, "the beautiful 
uncut hair of graves." Here are other good phrases, hke 
"the faint red roofs of mouths." Here, too, is undoubt- 
edly tender feeling. Here, into the bargain, is such rub- 
bish as "I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord," and 
such jargon as "Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff." 
In America this literary anarchy, this complete confusion 
of values, is especially eccentric; for America has gen- 
erally displayed an instinctive sense of what things are 
worth. One begins to see why Whitman has been so a Quality 
much more eagerly welcomed abroad than at home. His 
conception of equality, utterly ignoring values, is not that 
of American democracy, but rather that of European. 
His democracy, in short, is the least native which has ever 
found voice in our country. One deep grace of American 
democracy has been a tacit recognition that excellence is 
admirable. 



not 
American. 



376 The Rest of the Story 

Sometimes, of course, he was more articulate. The 
Civil War stirred him to his depths; and he drew from it 
such noble verses as " My Captain," his poem on the death 
of Lincoln, or such little pictures as "Ethiopia Saluting 
the Colors." Even in bits like these, however, which 
come so much nearer form than is usual with Whitman, 
one feels his perverse rudeness of style. Such eccentricity 
of manner is bound to affect different people in different 
ways. One kind of reader, naturally eager for individ- 

Eccen- uality and fresh glimpses of truth, is disposed to identify . 

Manner. oddity and originality. Another kind of reader instinc- 
tively distrusts literary eccentricity. In both of these 
opinions there is an element of truth. Some writers of 
great power prove naturally unable to express themselves 
properly. There have been great men, and there will be 
more, whom fate compels either to express themselves un- 
couthly or else to stay dumb. The critical temper which 
would hold them perverse, instead of unfortunate, is mis- 
taken. On the other hand, that, different critical temper 
which would welcome their perversities as newly revealed 
evidences of genius is quite as mistaken in another way. 
Oddity is no part of solid artistic development; however 
beautiful or impressive, it is rather an excrescent out- 
growth, bound to sap life from a parent stock which with- 
out it might grow more loftily and strongly. 

Walt Whitman's style is of this excrescent kind; it is 
something which nobody else can imitate with impunity. 
That it was inevitable you will feel if you compare 
"Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" or "My Captain" with 
the unchecked perversities of his verse in general. The 
"Song of Myself," which we may take as generally repre- 
sentative of his work, is so recklessly misshapen that you 



Walt Whitmaji 877 

cannot tell whether its author was able to write in tech- 
nical form. When you find him, however, as in those 
lesser, pieces, attempting to do so, you at once feel that his 
eccentricity is a misfortune, for which he is no more to 
blame than a deaf and dumb man is for expressing emotion 
by inarticulate cries. The alternative would have been 
silence; and Whitman was enough of a poet to make one 
glad that he never dreamed of that. 

In this decadent eccentricity of Whitman's style there 
is again something foreign to the spirit of this country, 
American men of letters have generally had deep artistic 
conscience. Now and again, to be sure, they have chosen 
to express themselves in what at first seems to be quite 
another manner. They have tried, for example, to repro- 
duce the native dialects of the American people. As we 
remarked of the Biglow Papers, however, this "dialect" 
literature of x^merica often reveals on analysis an artistic 
conscience as fine as Irving's, or Poe's, or Hawthorne's. 
The vagaries of Walt Whitman, on the other hand, seem 
utterly remote from literary conscience. Whitman's style, 
in short, is as little characteristic of America as his temper 
is of traditional American democracy. In America his 
oddities were more eccentric than they would have been 
anywhere else. 

On the other hand, there is an aspect in which Whitman His Best 
seems not only native but even promising. His life fell 
in chaotic times, when our past had faded and our future 
had not yet sprung into being. Bewildering confusion, 
fused by the accident of his lifetime into the seeming unity 
of a momentary whole, was the only aspect of human ex- 
istence which could be afforded him by the native country 
which he so truly loved. For want of other surroundings 



Quality. 



378 The Rest of the Story 

he was content to seek the meaning of hfe amid New York 
slums and dingy suburban country, in the crossing of the 
Brooklyn ferry, or in the hospitals of the Civil War. His 
lifelong eagerness to find in life the stuff of which poetry 
is made has brought him, after all, the reward he would 
most have cared for. In one aspect he is thoroughly 
American. The spirit of his work is that of world-old 
anarchy; his style has all the perverse oddity of paralytic 
decadence; but the substance of which his poems are 
made — their imagery as distinguished from their form or 
their spirit — comes wholly from his native country. In 
this aspect, then, though probably in no other, he may, 
after all, throw light on the future of literature in America. 



Ill 

LATER NEW ENGLAND 

References 

Works : Dr. Hale's works have been collected in a uniform edition, 
lo vols., Boston : Little, Brown & Co., 189S-1901. Colonel Higginson's 
works are similarly collected in 7 vols., Boston : Houghton, 1900. Bishop 
Brooks's works are published by E. P. Dutton & Co. ; Emily Dickinson's 
and Miss Alcott's, by Roberts Brothers ; Miss Jewett's, Celia Thaxter's, 
Sill's, Aldrich's, Fiske's, and Winsor's, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ; 
Mary Wilkins's, by the Harpers. 

Biography, Criticism, and Bibliography: For biographies, see 
the dictionaries of American biography ; for criticism, the reviews and 
magazine articles indicated in Poole's Index; for lists of titles, with dates, 
see Foley or Whitcomb. 

Selections: Stedman and Hutchinson (see index in Vol. XI). 

Before passing on to those parts of America to which 
we have not yet turned — the South and the West — ^we 
must glance at what has occurred in New England since 
its Renaissance. There is no better way of beginning 
than to recall the men who were living at Boston in 1857, 
the year with which our consideration of modern New 
York began. Everett, Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, Park- 
man, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, 
and Hawthorne were all alive, and many of them at the 
height of thoir powers. We need go no farther. Try 
to name the men of letters living in Boston to-day whose 
reputation is surely more than local, and you will discover 
at once that the present is a period of decline. 

379 



380 The Rest of the Story 

Though this dechne cannot yet be thoroughly accounted 
for, two or three facts about it are obvious. For one thing, 
as we have already seen, the intellectual Renaissance of 
New England coincided with its period of commercial 
prosperity, which began with foreign commerce, and 
soon passed into local manufactures and local railways. 

The During the first half of the nineteenth century Boston 

New'"*" was probably the most prosperous city in America. 

England. Throughout this period, however, the prosperity of Boston 
never crystallized in what nowadays would be consid- 
ered large fortunes. The great West, meanwhile, was 
untamed prairie and wilderness. 

The intellectual leadership of Boston may roughly be 
said to have lasted until the Civil War. That great 
national convulsion affected the Northern States some- 
what as an electric current affects temporarily separate 
chemicals; it flashed the Union into new cohesion. The 
wildest imagination of i860 could hardly have conceived 
such centralized national power as in 1900 had become 
commonplace to American thought. One price which 
every separate region must pay for such national union 
is a decline of local importance. 

Its External Again, a fcw ycars after the Civil War the Pacific Rail- 
way was at last completed. Long before this our foreign 
commerce had disappeared. The opening of the con- 
tinental transportation lines naturally stimulated that 
already great development of wheat-growing and the like 
which now makes our Western prairies perhaps the chief 
grain-producing region of the world. Coal, and oil, too, 
and copper, and iron began to sprout like weeds. The 
centre of economic importance in America inevitably 
shifted westward. Meantime, New England had lost 



Causes. 



Later New England 381 

that mercantile marine which might conceivably have 
maintained its importance in international trade. 

Again still, the immense development of Western wealth 
since i860 has resulted in enormous private fortunes. 
Though the fortunes of wealthy New Englanders have un- 
doubtedly increased, they have not increased in like 
proportion with the fortunes of the West. Such a state of 
economic fact could not fail, at least for a while, to bring 
about a marked change in American ideals. The immi- 
grant clergy of New England held such local power as 
involves personal eminence; such power later passed into 
the hands of the bar; and during the Renaissance of New 
England, literature itself had influence enough to make 
personal eminence its most stimulating prize. To-day, 
for better or worse, power and eminence throughout 
America have momentarily become questions rather of 
enterprising wealth. 

These external causes would perhaps have brought to An internal 
an end the leadership of New England; but we can see ^"^*" 
now as well that in the form which its Renaissance took, 
there was something which could not last long. As we 
look back on that period now, its most characteristic phase 
appears to have been that which began with Unitarianism, 
passed into Transcendentalism, and broke out into militant 
reform. These movements were all based on the funda- 
mental conception that human beings are inherently good. 
This naturally involved the right of every individual to 
think and to act as he chose. Free exercise of this right 
for a while seemed to uphold the buoyant philosophy 
which asserted it. So long as human beings were con- 
trolled by the discipline of tradition, their vagaries were 
not so wild as to seem disintegrating. As the years went 



382 The Rest of the Story 

on, however, this tendency inevitably led to excessive in- 
dividualism. So in recent times the writers of New Eng- 
land have tended to seem rather solitary individuals than 
contemporary members of a friendly or contentious school 
of letters. 

Among them, or rather apart from the rest, in the ripe- 
ness of an age which has come so gently that it hardly 
seems age at all, are three who in years belong to the older 
period. 
Mrs. Howe. Mrs. JuLiA Ward Howe (1819-), though bom and 
educated in New York, has lived in Boston ever since her 
marriage in 18^3 to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, whose 
work in alleviating the misfortunes of the blind accom- 
plished so much as almost to obscure his equally enthu- 
siastic work in the cause of liberty — first in Greece, later 
in the antislavery movement of New England. Mrs. 
Howe shared in the philanthropic impulses of her hus- 
band; she has been a constant and eager supporter of 
various reforms; and is now among the principal advo- 
cates of suffrage for women. A public speaker of apti- 
tude and skill, she has published less than she has 
uttered; but her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," begin- 
ning with that thriUing line, 

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," 

seems the supreme expression of the devoted spirit which 
animated the best antislavery enthusiasm. For along 
with its fervid sincerity and its noble simplicity — traits 
wkich might be paralleled in Whittier — it has that indefin- 
able power of appeal to popular feeling which has made its 
opening words part of the idiom of our nation. Besides 



Later New England 383 

this lyric, the portion of Mrs. Howe's writing which now 
seems most significant is that which records her vivid 
reminiscences of the times through which she has lived 
and worked. 

Something like this seems true of Colonel Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson (1823-), who has devoted himself Higginson. 
with equal constancy and enthusiasm to similar principles 
of reform. Born at Cambridge, he graduated from 
Harvard College and from the Harvard Divinity School, 
and was for some years a Liberal minister. He was 
conspicuous in the antislavery movement, and in 1862 he 
was given command of the first regiment recruited from 
contraband slaves. He served until 1864, when he was 
compelled to leave the service by a wound. Ever since 
that time he has been an industrious and prohfic writer, 
and an eager advocate of reform, particularly in the matter 
of suffrage for women. Colonel Higginson is remarkable 
not only for courteous bravery and devotion to his ideals, 
but for kindly tolerance of opinions honestly at variance 
with his own. His writings range from poems and stories 
and faithful criticisms to authoritative works of biography 
and history. But it now seems that none of them are 
at once more delightful and significant than his Chccrjul 
Yesterdays (1898), his Contemporaries (1899), and the other 
reminiscences in which he has preserved vivid pictures of 
the older time which he knew so thoroughly. 

Less radical in his sympathies, but no less philanthropic, 
is Dr. Edward Everett Hale (1822-). . A nephew of Dr. Haie. 
Edward Everett, and son of an eminent journalist, he 
graduated from Harvard, and became a Unitarian minis- 
ter. Throughout his pastoral career he has been not only 
a distinguished preacher, but a copious writer, often an 



384 



The Rest of the Story 



active journalist, and a constant promoter of good works. 
He is now (1904) Chaplain of the Senate of the United 
States. His writings range as widely as those of Colonel 
Higginson. Among them his short story, The Man With- 
out a Country (1863), stands out as probably the most 
popular expression in our literature of the Union sen- 
timent during the Civil War — ^just as Mrs. Howe's " Battle 
Hymn" is the most popular expression of antislavery 
fervor at the same time. Aside from this, the portions of 
Dr. Hale's copious work to which one is most apt to turn 
are those, like his New England Boyhood (1893), which 
deal with the elder New England of which he himself was 
no little part. 

Our three survivors of the Renaissance in New England 
thus seem particularly memorable for reminiscences, 
written in the declining days of Boston, of. more active 
times. What makes these reminiscences at once char- 
acteristic and stimulating is that none of the three has 
ever so lost heart as for a moment to feel that we are yet 
fallen on evil times. All three have seen reforms dear to 
them struggle and prevail. In all three faith and hope 
are as strong as ever, and charity is strengthening with 
the quiet vigor of years. Yet it is hard to avoid the thought 
that there is more than accidental significance in the fact 
that so much of their later work deals rather with the past 
than with the future. 

i\ll three can vividly remember the times when the 
orator}' of New England was at its best, and the scholarly 
history, and the philosophy, and the literature. Our busi- 
ness now is to inquire what has happened, since the time 
of Hawthorne, to these four phases of expression which 
were so vital in the middle of the nineteenth century. 



Later Nciv England 385 

Oratory seems extinct. Throughout the country, in- 
deed, the press has steadily tended to supplant the plat- 
form; and it is hardly invidious to say that there is no 
newspaper in New England which carries anything like 
such influence as the orators exerted there in their palmy 
days. Even the pulpit has distinctly declined. Since 
the untimely death of the late Bishop of Massachusetts, Bishop 
Phillips Brooks (1835- 1893), who was everywhere ^'■°°'^^ 
recognized as a great preacher, there has been no divine 
in New England whose utterances could certainly com- 
mand more than local attention. 

With history the case is different. The earlier type of 
historians, who seemed as much men of letters as men 
of learning, came to an end with Parkman. Later his- History 
torical activity has seemed a matter rather of science than 
of literature; but it has been considerable. State historical 
societies and local antiquarians and genealogists have 
been making more and more accessible, often in excellent 
editions, the copious records of colonial New England. 
Among more sustained historical works have been the 
learned co-operative histories edited by Justin Winsor winsor 
(1831-1897), who was equally eminent as a scholar 
and as the librarian first of the Public library of Boston 
and later of Harvard College. His chief original work 
is an exhaustive life of Christopher Columbus (i8gi). 
Somewhat more characteristic are his Memorial History 
0} Boston (1880-1881) and his very elaborate Narrative 
and Critical History of America (1886-1889). In both of 
these he planned and supervised vast works, of which the 
separate chapters were written under his guidance, by 
expert authorities. The title of his second co-operative 
history is suff'icient to remind us that historical activity in 



Adams. 



386 The Rest of the Story 

New England has by no means confined itself to local 
matters. In general, however, it has confmed itself to 
matters American. 

Henry Henry Auams (1838-), for example, a son of the 

first Charles Francis Adams, and a grandson and a great- 
grandson of the two New England presidents of the United 
States, may fairly be counted a New Englander, though 
for many years he has lived in Washington. His History 
0} the United States, from 1801 to 181 7, which appeared 
between 1889 and 1891, combines accuracy of detail with 
grasp of his subject and scale of composition in a manner 
which fairly achieves, in dealing with a limited epoch, 
what Macaulay did not live to achieve when he tried to 
deal with two English centuries. His brothers, the sec- 

c. F. ond Charles Francis Adams (1833-) and Brooks 

Adams (1848-), have published, and are still publish- 
ing, suggestive critical works on historical matters in gen- 
eral, mostly as they are related to the history of America. 

Rhodes. J AMES FoRD RHODES (1848-), a native of Ohio, who 
settled in Boston about 1895, is still engaged there 
on his History 0} the United States from the Compromise 
oj 18^0. This work, of which the first volume appeared 
in 1893, is remarkable for the judicial temper with which 
it sets forth, in excellent literary form, the events of a 
stirring period still within living memory. And John 

Ropes. CoDMAN RoPES ( 1 836- 1 899), an eminent member of the 

Boston bar, was everywhere recognized as an authority 
on military history. His chief books concern the cam- 
paigns of Napoleon and those of our own Civil War. 

Excellent as the work of these historians has been, often 
in form as well as in substance, it has not had quite the 
sort of literary charm which made their more romantic 



Adams. 
Brooks 
Adams. 



Later New England 387 

predecessors widely popular. Something of such popular 
quahty, without the misleading glamor of romance, per- 
vaded the historical work of John Fiske (1842-1901), Fiske. 
who devoted his last fifteen years chiefly to the writing of 
a series of books on American history. Taken together, 
these cover the subject cursorily yet with a pervasive 
understanding of its significance in modern philosophic 
thought, from the discovery of America until after the 
Revolution. Fiske, who graduated from Harvard in 1863, 
was a voracious reader with a marvellous memor\', with 
remarkable power of perceiving the relations between 
apparently diverse phases of his information, and with 
unfailing command of lucid and fluent style. His slight 
lack of originality prevented him from vagary, and made 
him a safe guide for those general readers who in recent 
years have been attracted to history as a matter not of 
romance but of philosophy. 

For Fiske, before turning to history, had been known 
as a popular writer of philosophy. His Cosmic Philosophy Phu- 
(1874) is an admirably compact and lucid statement of °^°^ ^' 
the by no means compact or lucid tenets of Herbert 
Spencer; and Fiske went on, with due respect for the prin- 
ciples of evolution, to set forth in various works the new 
light which he conceived these principles to throw on the 
world-old questions of God, of eternity, and of human 
destiny. 

In this extreme recoil from the metaphysical abstractions 
of Transcendentalism, the whole tendency of New England 
philosophy, so far as it has reached the stage of popular 
publication, is typified. New England still loves general 
principles, but it no longer trusts those principles unless it 
can be comfortably assured that they are not belied by 



388 



The Best of the Story 



William 
James. 



Royce. 



ascertained fact. The most recent popular philosopher 
exemplifies this tendency. William James (1842-), whose 
father, the elder Henry James (1811-1882), was a searcher 
for truth of the earlier type, has been for many years, 
after a medical education. Professor of Psychology at 
Harvard. His Principles 0} Psychology (1890) and his 
Gifford lectures, the Varieties of Religious Experience, 
delivered at Edinburgh in 1902, have given him inter- 
national reputation. 

William James is not alone among Harvard philoso- 
phers either in publication or in international recognition. 
His colleague, Josiah Royce (1855- ), has also been a 
Gifford lecturer; and his works on metaphysics combine 
extraordinar}' power of stating the tenets of past thinkers 
wdth a strength of philosophic imagination which bids 
fair to make him one with whom future thinkers must 
reckon. Another colleague, George Herbert Palmer 
(1842-), has published helpful comments on the conduct 
of life; and some admirable translations from the Greek, 
santayana. Another Still, far younger, George Santayana (1863-), 
has published some noteworthy books of aesthetics, and 
two or three volumes of poetry which no lover of poetry 
should neglect. As popular philosophers, however, 
these men have not appealed to so wide a public as 
their more ob\iously scientific contemporaries, Fiske 
and James. 

Nor have the other than philosophic writers now or 
lately connected with Harvard proved widely popular. 
No student of English hterature, to be sure, can ever 
neglect the work of Francis James Child (1825-1896), 
whose final collection of EngHsh and Scottish popular 
ballads is a model of sympathetic learning. Nor can any 



Palmer. 



Professor 
Child. 



Later New England 380 

consideration of New England during the years we now 

have in mind neglect the gracious figure of Charles Professor 

, . , ,1 Norton. 

Eliot Norton (182 7-), in whose person and whose 
utterances Harvard students of the last quarter of the 
nineteenth century found embodied, their ideal of culture 
and of bravery. It has not been Professor Nojrton's fort- 
une to sympathize with the tendencies of the age amid 
which he has faithfully maintained the ideals from which 
he has never swerved. And the spirit of his gentle but 
unfaltering assertion of what he beheves the truth has 
taught his pupils a lesson the deeper and the more lasting 
from the fact that many of them could not accept the letter 
of his teachings. 

Something of the same moral quality has appeared in 
the work of the man who throughout Professor Norton's 
academic career has been President of Harvard College. 
And it is pleasant to think that this touch of community 
between men who seem in many ways so different may 
be partly due to the fact that Charles William Eliot president 
(1834-) is Professor Norton's cousin, that both are sprung ''°*" j^^ 
from families and from traditions eminent and honorable 
in old New England. The sympathies of Professor Norton 
have tended to emphasize the ideals of the past. Those of 
President Eliot have tended, amid what most men would 
have found disheartening lack of sympathy, to dwell on the 
hopes which he has never ceased to discern in the future. 
His influence on the conduct of education in America is at 
last recognized as the most potent of his time, if not indeed 
in all our national history. If his principles may be sum- 
marized, they may perhaps be stated thus : The surest hope 
of democracy lies in a diffusion of education which shall 
admit to the highest available training every human being 



390 The Rest of the Story 

who is capable of benefiting by it. Accordingly, every 
merely technical obstacle which may interpose itself be- 
tween the most remote primary school in the Western wil- 
derness and the full privileges of our universities must, if 
possible, be removed. And yet, all the while, the stand- 
ard of the higher education must be maintained. So all his 
life his task has been at once to destroy needless barriers 
and to uphold those which are needful. 

It may appear that we have dwelt too long on Harvard ; 
but Harvard remains the chief intellectual centre of that 
part of New England from which the literature of our 
Harvard. Renaissance sprang. It was at Harvard, on the whole, 
that the elder school of New England letters was nurtured. 
Harvard men edited the old North American Review. 
Through Fields's time the influence of Harvard traditions 
was paramount in the Atlantic Monthly. Emerson was 
a Harvard man; Longfellow and Lowell were Harvard 
professors. And so on. The contrast between the elder 
Harvard and the new becomes apparent. Since the days 
of the Renaissance, which we considered by themselves. 
Harvard, for all its incessant activities, has been of no 
great literary importance. It has tended to an intellectual 
isolation from which the separate men who have addressed 
the public have addressed them each separately and in 
his own way ; and among all these men on whom we have 
touched, only one has attempted a contribution to pure 
literature. This is Professor Santayana, in his two or 
three volumes of poetry. 

Throughout the period which we now have in mind, the 

Poetry. production of poetry in New England has been copious. 

A good deal of this verse has been of more than respectable 

quality; but so httle of it has emerged into distinct excel- 



Late?' New England 391 

lence that, if anyone were asked to name the poets of 
New England in recent times he might find himself at 
fault. He might perhaps recall the pleasant memory 
of Celia Thaxter (1836- 1 894), who passed most of 
her busy, brave, useful life at the Isle of Shoals, where 
she was born and died, and whose verses, together with 
one or two volumes of prose, delightfully record the 
temper with which such humanity as hers could surpass 
what to most human beings would have been the be- 
numbing limits of isolation. He might recall, too, as of 
New England origin, the less distinct figure of Edward 
Rowland Sill (1841-1887), whose few, but admirable, 
poems bespeak the isolation of a Transcendentalist born 
too late. He would probably recall the hauntingly 
mournful isolation phrased in the still more solitary 
poems of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), whose mood 
laments a vanished past almost as palpably as the mood 
of Transcendentalism welcomed an unfathomed future. 
But almost the only figure which would define itself with 
certaintv would be that of Thomas Bailey Aldrich Aidrkh. 
(1836-): 

Aldrich, like Fields before him, passed most of his 
youth in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Then, for a while, 
he was engaged first in business, and later in journalism at 
New York. He did not settle in Boston until he was 
nearly thirty years old; but as he has lived there ever since, 
he has long been recognized as the chief surviving man of 
letters there resident. The circumstances of his earlier 
years, however, have naturally precluded him from imme- 
diate inheritance of local traditions. And his exquisitely 
finished verse — never copious, but never free from a loving 
care for everv detail which makes it seem better each time 



892 The Rest of the Story 

you read it — accordingly appears almost as independent 
of local influences as was the verse of Poe in the New 
York of the '40s. 

With Aldrich's prose work the case has been different. 
His Story 0} a Bad Boy (1870) records boy life in the dying 
New Hampshire seaport as vividly as Lucy Larcom's New 
England Girlhood (1889) records her memories of Massa- 
chusetts in the '30s. And although Aldrich's other stories, 
and the like, have less New England flavor, there is not a 
little of it in many of them; nor is there any of them which 
we cannot turn to with certainty of such satisfaction as 
should come from works of conscientious art. None the 
less, the fact that Howells, an Ohio man, was succeeded 
in control of the Ailantic Monthly by Aldrich, whose early 
years were passed in New Hampshire, New Orleans, and 
New York, is a fact which both typifies and explains the 
manner in which the older literary traditions of New 
England have been disintegrating. 

Of the writers of fiction who have flourished there mean- 
Fiction, while, the most popular have been women. The Little 
Women (1867) of Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is a 
story of New England girlhood as vivid and as true as were 
Jacob Abbott's " Rollo" tales of New England childhood a 
generation before. The earlier stories of Miss Mary 
WiLKiNS (1862-) portray with touching pathos and humor 
the decline of the New England country, as the period with 
which we are now concerned came upon it. And the stories 
of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-) are equally true to 
the pathos of this declining New England, and at the same 
time almost as exquisite in finish as are the stories in 
general of Aldrich. Meanwhile, Mrs. Margaret Deland 
(1857-), a Pennsylvanian, whose married life has been 



Later New England 393 

passed in Boston, has written, after one or two volumes of 
delicate poetry, a number of stories which deal, uncom- 
promisingly yet tenderly, with various religious and social 
questions such as the conditions of modern life are bound 
everywhere to raise. 

There are men in Boston the while who have written 
fiction, and written it well. Even so cursory a glance as 
ours cannot fairly neglect the names of Arlo Bates 
(1850-), poet, novelist, and faithful teacher of literature; 
of Thomas Russell Sullivan (1849-), whose stories vie 
with Aldrich's in delicacy of finish, and more than vie with 
them in significance; and of Frederic Jesup Stimson 
(1855-), a lawyer and a publicist, whose occasional con- 
tributions to literature have indicated extraordinary range 
and power. And perhaps the chief work of fiction which 
has proceeded from New England since the elder days is 
the Unleavened Bread (1902) of Robert Grant (1852-), 
whose copious earlier work, produced amid the duties of a 
busy legal and judicial career, is obscured chiefly by the 
exceptional strength of this unflinching study of the mis- 
chief a bad woman can do, when she has no idea that 
she is bad. 

But, when all is said and done, these New England Summary, 
writers of the present day form no school, like the school 
which reached its maturity under the influence of the New 
England Renaissance. We have touched incidentally on a 
number of names. The list is by no means exhaustive; 
yet it is doubtful whether the names which we have chanced 
to neglect would have added any definitely new features to 
the picture we have tried to discern in outline. The work 
of modern New England is faithful, and technically skilful. 
It is not animated by any general purpose, and the fact 



394 The Rest of the Story 

that so much of it tends in substance to be reminiscent 
indicates that, on the whole, it is hardly national in range. 
It is too close to us for more certain generalization. 

One thing, however, must long have been evident. So 
far we have altogether neglected three novelists of more 
eminence than any whom we have mentioned. These 
are Ho wells, James, and Crawford. The reason why we 
have neglected them is that they seem important enough 
for separate consideration. 



IV 

THE NOVEL: HOWELLS, JAMES, AND CRAWFORD 

References 

Works : The works of Howells are published by the Harpers ; those 
of Crawford, by Macmillan. The earUer works of James were mostly 
published by Osgood and by Ticknor and Fields, Boston ; the later ones 
are from various publishers. For lists of titles, see Foley. 

Biography and Criticism : For biographies, see any good dictionary 
of American biography ; for criticism, consult Poole's Index for references 
to various reviews and critical notes. Particularly to be noted is Howells's 
article on James in The Century for November, 1882. 

Selections: For Howells, Stedman, and Hutchinson, IX, 479-505; 
James, ibid., X, 179-197; Crawford, ibid., XI, 143-153. 

Both in New York and in New England the most 
popular form of recent literature has probably been the 
short story. From influences in a way common to both 
regions, combined with influences quite distinct, there 
have emerged meanwhile the three American novelists 
who have attained such eminence as to demand separate 
consideration. One — Howells — is completely American; 
the other two — James and Crawford — are Americans 
whose principal work has been deeply affected by Euro- 
pean environment. It is worth our while to consider them 
in turn. 

William Dean Howells (183 7-) was born in Ohio, Howeiis. 
where he tried journalism and meanwhile wrote verse. 
He early came to New England and met Longfellow, 
Lowell, and the other chief figures of our New England 
Renaissance. In i860 he wrote a campaign life of Lincoln. 

395 



396 The Rest of the Story 

Between 1861 and 1865 he was our consul at Venice. In 
1872 he succeeded Fields as editor of the Atlantic Monthly. 
For some years he lived in or near Boston. For the past 
ten or twelve years he has lived in New York. There, 
particularly in the "Easy Chair" of Harper's Monthly y 
he has probably had as marked an influence upon fellow 
writers as upon the public, who know him better through 
his books. 

These books are, broadly speaking, essays, farces, and 
novels. The essays have sometimes been reminiscent of 
Ohio or early New England, sometimes finely appreciative 
of literature. The farces, slight as such things must be, 
have shown brilliancy of dialogue and persistent reality 
of characterization. This last quahty appears even more 
conspicuously in the most important work of Howells — 
his novels. As early as 1871 he wrote Their Wedding 
Journey; since then he has published some forty novels, 
of which The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is perhaps the 
best. All are patient, insistent, yet often brilliant studies 
of average men and women. 

Howells has written so much, so faithfully, and in a 
spirit at once so earnestly American and so kindly, that it 
is hard to say why he has not achieved more certainly 
powerful results. His chief limitation seems to be a kind 
Diffidence, of lifcloug diffidcncc, which has forbidden a feeling of inti- 
mate famiharity even with the scenes and the people of his 
own creation. This is perhaps due to the circumstances of 
his life. An Ohio boy, he was of course a foreigner in Italy ; 
and during his long and welcome residence near Boston 
he never seems to have felt quite at home. His pleasant 
reminiscences of his friendships with the eminent literary 
men of the past show implicitly the sentiments rather of 



Howells, Jmrics, and Crawford 397 

a pilgrim than of a fellow. And the vivid creatures of his 
imagination are after all seen externally. He never quite 
sympathizes with them; he never seems quite to understand 
them. In brief, his novels rather indicate, with tireless 
energy, the material of which literature might be made 
than mould that material into final form. With all his 
limitations, nevertheless, he is surely the most noteworthy 
American novelist of the years through which he is still 
happily living. 

For it is not quite certain that Henry James (1843-) Henry 
should be unreservedly called American. His earlier ^^°^^^- 
years were passed in America, partly in New York and 
partly in New England; his first novels concerned Amer- 
ican life, and were published in Boston; but for more 
than twenty years he has lived abroad, mostly in Eng- 
land; and his later work is perhaps the most subtle 
study of English life, in its more complex aspects, that has 
ever been made. The so-called "international novel" 
is largely of his construction. Roderick Hudson (1875), 
that model short story Daisy Miller (1878), and the Portrait 
oj a Lady (1881) are among his best-known works. He 
has also written a life of Hawthorne and several other 
volumes of very discerning criticism. 

Temperamentally, James is completely an artist. From 
beginning to end, his effort has been to feel, as deeplv 
as possible, the distinct character of any subject with 
which he has dealt ; and to set it forth in the most delicate 
shades of its significance. The exquisite refinement of 
both his perception and his style has proved insidious. 
Year by year his work has grown more subtle, more dif- 
ficult to understand without an intensity and persistence 
of attention which no man of letters may confidently 



398 



The Rest of the Story 



demand. Yet there can be no doubt that such persistent 
attention to the pages of James will never lack reward. 
Among contemporary English novelists, none is more 
masterly. 

Francis Marion Crawford (1854-) is less American 
still. Except for the fact that, thougli born in Italy, he 
is of American origin and has always been loyal to Amer- 
ican tradition, he can hardly be called American at all. 
He began writing fiction only after prolonged study in 
various parts of the world. Of his fifty years, all but 
four or five, at intervals, have been passed abroad. 

Without pretence to the first rank in literature, Craw- 
ford is a born story-teller. There is not one of his many 
volumes to which one cannot confidently turn for enter- 
tainment. And his intimate knowledge of modern Italy is 
said to give his stories of contemporary Italian life — such 
as Saracinesca (1887) — a value similar to that of Anthony 
Trollope's stories about Victorian England. Crawford 
lacks the pertinacity of observation which is among the 
chief merits of Howells; he is utterly without such subtlety 
as is at once the chief grace and the chief error of James. 
He is less important than either of them, but far more 
readable. And in spite of qualities which sometimes 
seem meretricious, he has a robust vigor of feeling and of 
manner which makes his work throughout inspiriting. 

Such are the three American novehsts who, from among 
such influences as produced our elder literature, have 
surely achieved eminence. Clearly they are too diverse, 
and too near us, for generalization. We must turn now 
to regions of our country less remarkable in literary his- 
tory than either New England or New York, but not to be 
neglected. And first to the South. 



V 

THE SOUTH 

References 

General : Louise Manly, Southern Literature, Richmond : Johnson 
Publishing Co., 1895; Woodberry, America in Literature, New York: 
Harper, 1903 ; pp. 1 14-149 ; Trent, Simms (see below) ; W. M. Basker- 
vill, Southern Writers. Biographical and Critical Studies, Nashville: 
Barber & Smith. (Harris, Lanier, Cable, Craddock, Page, Allen, 
and others.) 

Simms : Novels, 10 vols., New York : Armstrong, 1882 ; Poems, 2 vols., 
New York: Redfield, 1853. W. P. Trent's William Gilmore Simms, 
Boston : Houghton, 1892 (aml), has a good bibliography. For selections, 
see Duyckinck. II, 430-433 ; Griswold's Poetry, 345-348 ; Griswold's 
Prose, 505-517; Stedman, 106-107; Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 
270-277. 

Hayne : Poems, Boston: Lothrop, 1882. See Sidney Lanier's "Paul 
H. Hayne's Poetry" in Music and Poetry, New York: Scribner, 1898, 
pp. 197-2 1 1. There are selections from Hayne in Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, VIII, 461-466. 

Timrod: Timrod's Works (Memorial Edition), Boston : Houghton, 
1899, contains a memoir. For selections, see Stedman and Hutchinson, 
VIII, 408-411. 

Lanier : Works, New York : Scribner (uniform, but no collected edi- 
tion) ; for a list of titles, see Foley, 165-166. To the edition of Lanier's 
poems, edited by his wife (New York : Scribner, 1884), W. H. Ward 
contributed a biography. There are selections in Stedman and Hutch- 
inson, X, 145-151. 

For biographies of later Southern writers, whose works are easily acces- 
sible, see any good dictionary of American biography ; for criticism upon 
them, see the magazine articles and reviews which can readily be found 
by means of Poole's Index. 

The Middle vStates and New England, after certain lit- 
erary achievements, seem now in a stage either of decline 

399 



of Life. 



400 The Rest of the Story 

or at best of preparation for some literature of the future. 
The other parts of the country, at which we have now 
to glance, need not detain us long. However copious 
their production, it has not yet afforded us much of 
permanent value. 

Up to the Civil War the South had produced hardly any 
writing which expressed more than a sense that standard 
models are excellent. For this comparative literary life- 
Icssness there is obvious historical reason. The difference 
Conditions bctwTcn the Southcm climate and the Northern has often 
been dwelt on; so has the difference between the social 
systems of the two parts of the country. It has often been 
remarked, too, that the oligarchic system of the South 
developed powerful politicians. At the time of the Revolu- 
tion, for example, our most eminent statesmen were from 
Virginia; and when the Civil War came, though the 
economic superiority of the North was bound to win, 
the political superiority of the South seemed generally 
evident. One plain cause of these facts has not been 
much emphasized. 

From the beginning, the North was politically free and 
essentially democratic; its social distinctions were nothing 
like so rigid as those which have generally diversified civil- 
ized society. There was no mob ; the lower class of New 
England produced Whittier. In a decent Yankee village, 
to this day, you need not lock your doors at night; and 
when crime turns up in the North, as it does with increas- 
ing frequency, you can still trust the pohce to attend to it. 
In the South, at least from the moment when slavery estab- 
lished itself, a totally different state of affairs prevailed. 
The African slaves, constantly increasing in number, 
seemed the most dangerous lower class which had ever 



tism. 



The South 401 

faced an English-speaking government. The agricult- 
ural conditions of Southern life meanwhile prevented 
population from gathering in large centres. As slavery- 
developed, the South accordingly grew to be a region 
where a comparatively small governing class, the greater 
part of whom lived separately on large country places, 
felt themselves compelled, by the risk of servile insur- 
rection, to devote their political energies to the rigid main- 
tenance of established order. Whether slavery was really 
so dangerous as people thought may be debatable; there 
can be no question that people living in such circum- conserva- 
stances could hardly help believing it so. Surrounded by 
an increasing servile population of aliens, the ruling classes 
of our elder South dreaded pohtical experiment to a de- 
gree almost incomprehensible in the North. More and 
more, consequently, the ablest men of the South tended 
to concentrate their energies on politics, and in politics 
to develop increasingly conservative temper. 

The natural result was such as conservatism would pro- 
duce anywhere. Up to the time of the Civil War a normal 
Southerner was far less changed from his emigrant ancestor 
than was any New England Yankee. As in the develop- 
ment of national character the North lagged behind 
England, so the South lagged behind the North. Long 
ago we saw how our first great civil war — the American 
Revolution — sprang from mutual misunderstandings, in- 
volved in the different rates of development of England 
and her x^merican colonies. Something of the same kind, 
we can see now, underlay the Civil War which once 
threatened the future of the American Union. 

Of course the South was never destitute of powerful or 
of cultivated minds; and from the beginning there were 



402 



The Rest of the Story 



William 
Byrd, of 
Westover. 



Political 
Writing. 



Southern books. A rather fantastic habit includes among 
these the voyages of Captain John Smith and the EHza- 
bethan translation of Ovid by George Sandys, a portion of 
which was made on the banks of the James River; and there 
are various old historical writings from the South. The 
best of these seem the posthumously published manu- 
scripts of William Byrd (1664-1744), of Westover, Vir- 
ginia, whose style is very like that of his contemporary 
Englishmen of quality. In the fact that Byrd's records of 
contemporary history were written for his private pleasure 
by a great landed proprietor, and that they saw the light 
only when he had been nearly a century in his grave, 
there is something characteristic of the South. Southern 
gentlemen of an intellectual turn collected considerable 
libraries; but these hbraries, chiefly of serious standard 
literature, tended to become traditional repositories of 
culture. Southern taste commanded each generation to 
preserve its culture unaltered, much as political necessity 
compelled the South to keep unaltered its government 
and its society. 

At the time of the Revolution, of course, the develop- 
ment of political intelligence in the South produced power- 
ful political writing. The Declaration of Independence, 
which came straight from the pen of Thomas Jefferson 
(i 743-1826), is the masterpiece of a school in which 
Jefferson, though perhaps the principal figure, was by no 
means solitary. As in the North, too, this pohtical writ- 
ing tended during the first half of the nineteenth century 
to develop into rhetorical oratory; and though among 
American orators Webster and Everett and Choate and 
their New England contemporaries seem the best, no 
special study of American oratory can neglect such men 



The South 403 

as John Caldwell Calhoun (i 782-1850), Robert Young 
Hayne (1791-1839), or Henry Clay (1777-1852). Oratory, 
however, is not pure letters, but rather a phase of public 
life ; and our concern is chiefly with literature. 

After Jefferson the chief Southerners who should be 
mentioned in Hterary history are the following: William 
Wirt (i 772-1834), a Virginia lawyer, for some years At- 
torney-General of the United States, whose elaborately 
rhetorical Lije 0} Patrick Henry (181 7) places its author 
among the more important American biographers; John 
Marshall (i 755-1835), the most eminent Chief Justice of 
the Supreme Court of the United States, also a Virginian, 
whose celebrated Life 0} Washington (1805) is perhaps 
the most distinguished American biography; Edward 
CoATE PiNCKNEY (1802-1828), a Maryland lawyer 
and professor, who published certain volumes of poetry 
which reveal a true lyric gift; William Gilmore Simms 
(1806-1870); John Pendleton Kennedy (i 795-1870); 
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870); Charles 
Etienne Arthur Gayarre (1805-1895); John Esten 
Cooke (1830-1886) ; Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-1886) ; 
Henry Timrod (1829-1867); and Sidney Lanier (1842- 
1881). Among notable Southern periodicals have been 
the Southern Review, which was published at Charles- 
ton in 1828 and had a short life; the Southern Literary Periodi- 
Messenger, which was published in Richmond from 1835 
to 1864 and was at one time edited by Poe; and the South- 
ern Quarterly Review, which was established at Charles- 
ton in 1848, remained for several years under the editor- 
ship of Simms, and came to an end in 1856. 

Of these names the earlier clearly belong to the tradi- 
tions of the eighteenth century. Several of the later are 



404 The Rest of the Story 

Kennedy, already almost forgotten. Kennedy, a Maryland man 
eminent in political life, was the author of the novels 
Swallow Barn (1832), Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835), and 

Long- others. Longstreet, a Georgia man, a graduate of Yale, 
a lawyer, a judge, a Methodist minister, and the president 
of two or three Southern colleges, contributed to various 
newspapers sketches of Southern life, which in 1840 were 
collected into a volume called Georgia Scenes. These are 
successful prototypes of the local short stories which during 
the past fifteen or twenty years have so generally appeared 

Gayarre'. in various parts of the country. Gayarre was a -New 
Orleans lawyer. His works on the history of his native 
State, published between 1847 ^^^ 1854, and culminating 
in a three- volume History oj Louisiana published in 
1866, are respectable and authoritative local histories. 
Late in life he produced one or two novels and comedies, 

Cooke. which were never widely read. Cooke, of Virginia, a law- 
yer and a Confederate soldier, devoted -the chief activity 
of his mature years to literature. Besides lives of General 
Lee and Stonewall Jackson, he wrote certain romances 
connected with his native State before and after the 
Civil War. 

It is hardly too much to say that if these sporadic writers 
had not been Southerners, they would have been even 
more forgotten than they arc, along with the Northern 
Literati momentarily enshrined in 1846 by Edgar Allan 
Poe. There are only four Southern names which now 
seem of hterary importance; and of these only one stands 
for considerable work before the Civil War. 

This is William Gilmore Simms, who was born in 
Charleston, South Carolina, was apprenticed to an 
apothecary, and later began the study of law. At the 



Simms. 



The South 405 

age of twenty-one he married, and a year later he pub- 
lished a volume of commonplace poetry. From that time 
until his death he produced no less than eighty-seven 
volumes. 

The immense bulk of Simms's writings involved hasty 
and careless composition; and the romances, to which his 
popularity was chiefly due,. are not only careless but ob- 
viously affected by both Cooper and Scott, not to speak 
of minor influences. In their day some of them were 
w'idely popular; at present even their names are almost 
forgotten. For all their careless haste, however, they 
indicate uncommon vigor of temperament, and amid 
the obvious conventions of their plots and characters they 
constantly reveal, like the earlier romances of Rrockden 
Brown and of Cooper, a true sense of the background in 
which the scenes were laid. : 

Up to the time of the Civil War, beyond much question, 
Simms was by far the most considerable literary man 
whom the Southern States produced. In South Carolina 
he was long recognized as the principal figure of a literary 
epoch contemporary with that in which New England pro- 
duced Emerson and Thoreau, and Whittier, and Long- 
fellow, and Lowell, and Holmes, and Hawthorne. This 
collocation of names is enough. The chief Southern man 
of letters before the Civil War did vigorous, careless work 
of the sort which had produced more lasting monuments 
in the New York of Fenimore Cooper. Cooper's work, 
we have seen, was virtually complete in 1832 ; and Simms's 
did not begin until 1833. In literature, as in temper, the 
South lagged behind the North. 

The next Southern writer who deserves attention is Hayne. 
Paul Hamilton Hayne, a nephew of that distinguished 



406 The Rest of the Story 

South Carolina Senator whose speech on NulUfication 
in 1830 elicited Webster's famous reply. Paul Hayne 
was born in this very year when his uncle and Webster 
were debating in the Senate. He studied for the bar, 
but devoted himself chiefly to literature at a time when 
the literary activity of Charleston was dominated by 
Simms. When the Civil War came he entered the 
Southern army; he broke down his health in the ser- 
vice. The war left him, too, ruined in property; but he 
survived, working hard at letters in the Georgia country, 
until 1886. Hayne eagerly strove to maintain the lit- 
erary dignity of the native region which he passionately 
loved. A man of gentler origin than Simms, and better 
educated, he seems more in sympathy with the formal tra- 
ditions of the South Carohna gentry. He shows, too, an 
academic sense of conventional standards. In this aspect 
Hayne had something in common with the New England 
poets. Certainly, compared with the best work of Timrod 
and of Sidney Lanier, his poetry seems deficient in indi- 
viduality and passion; yet it reveals a touch of genuine- 
ness almost unknown in the South until the fatal days 
of secession. 

In 1873 Hayne edited the poems of his friend, Henry 
Timrod. Timrod. Timrod had in him the stuff of which poetry is 
made, and the circumstances of his career made some of 
his expression of it admirable. He was born in Charles- 
ton, the son of an artisan who was known as the Poet 
Mechanic. He studied for a while at the University of 
Georgia; he then turned to the law; and for some time be- 
fore the Civil War he was a private tutor. During the war 
he was a journalist. At the burning of Columbia during 
Sherman's march to the sea his property was totally de- 



The South 407 

stroyed; in 1867 his consequent poverty brought to an end 
a life which was never physically robust. 

Among Timrod's poems, one, "The Cotton Boll," sur- 
passes the rest. The eccentric irregularity of its labored 
verse cannot disguise its lyric note; and the sense of Nat- 
ure which it reveals is as fine, as true, and as simple as 
that which makes so nearly excellent Whittier's poems 
about New England landscapes. The closing stanza of 
the poem reveals the anguish of the Civil War in lines of 
nobly sustained lyric fervor. 

We can hardly read even short extracts from Timrod, 
however, without feeling, along with his lyric quality, 
a puzzling, inarticulate indistinctness. A similar trait 
appears in the work of the most memorable man of 
letters as yet produced by the South — Sidney Lanier Lanier. 
(1842-1881). Born at Macon, Georgia, Lanier graduated 
from a Georgia college in i860, and at the outbreak of the 
Civil War he enlisted as a Confederate volunteer. Tow- 
ards the close of the war he was taken prisoner; the phys- 
ical hardships of his military experience produced a weak- 
ness of the lungs from which he never recovered. After the 
war he was for a while a school-teacher, and for a while a 
lawyer in Alabama and Georgia. In 1873 ^^ removed to 
Baltimore, where at first he supported himself by playing 
the flute in a symphony orchestra. Soon, however, he 
became known as a man of letters; and in 1879, two years 
before his death, he was made a lecturer on English litera- 
ture at Johns Hopkins University. 

A true lyric artist, Lanier was a skilful musician, and 
he wrote genuine poetry. The circumstances of his life, 
however, were such as to preclude a very high degree of 
technical training, and, at least until after the war had 



408 The Rest of the Story 

broken his health, much systematic study. What he 
accompHshed under these circumstances is astonishing. 
He was never popular, and probably never will be. His 
quality was too fine to appeal to the general public; his 
training was too imperfect to make his critical work or his 
theories of aesthetics seem important to technical scholars. 
He was compelled, besides, to write more than was good for 
him — at least one novel, for example, and versions for boys 
of much old romance, concerning King Arthur, and the 
heroes of Froissart, the Welsh talcs of the Mabinogion, and 
Percy's Reliques. He wrote nothing more characteristic, 
however, than The Science of English Verse (1880), which 
comprises the substance of his first course of lectures at 
Johns Hopkins. To state his serious and earnest system 
of dogmatic poetics would take too long. In brief, he be- 
lieved the function of poetry to be far nearer to that of 
music than it has generally been held. The emotional 
effect of poetry he declared to arise literally from its sound 
quite as much as from its meaning; and the poetry which 
he wrote was decidedly affected by this deliberate, sincere, 
but somewhat cramping theory. 

Lanier's lyric quality, as well as his self-imposed limita- 
tions, appear more clearly in his "Marshes of Glynn." 
Here his poetical impulse is expressed in a musical form 
which he might have called symphonic. He is no longer 
writing a song; he is working out a complicated motive, in 
a manner so entirely his own that the first thirty-six lines 
compose one intricate, incomprehensible sentence. The 
closing passage, easier to understand, possesses quite as 
much symphonic fervor. The poet has been gazing out 
over the marshes and trying to phrase the limitless emo- 
tion which arises as he contemplates a trackless plain 



The South 409 

where land and sea interfuse. Then the tide begins to 
rise, and he goes on thus: 

"Lo, out of his plenty the sea 
Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be: 
Look how the grace of the sea doth go 
About and about through the intricate channels that flow 
Here and there, Everywhere, 
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying 

lanes 
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins 
That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow 
In the rose-and-silver evening glow. 

Farewell, my lord Sun! 
The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run 
'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir; 
Passes a hurrying sound of wings that westward whir; 
Passes, and all is still; and the currents cease to run; 
And the sea and the marsh are one. 

"How still the plains of the waters be! 
The tide is in his ecstasy. 
The tide is at his highest height: 
And it is night. 

"And now from the Vast of the Lord wiU the waters of sleep 
Roll in on the souls of men. 
But who will reveal to our waking ken 
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep 

Under the waters of sleep? 
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide 

comes in 
On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of 
Glynn." 

Now this inarticulate verse is of a quality which can 
never be popular, and perhaps indeed is so eccentric that 
one should be prudent in choosing adjectives to praise 



410 The Rest of the Story 

it. The more you read the "Marshes of Glynn," how- 
ever, and the more, indeed, you read any of Lanier's 
poetry, the more certain you feel that he was among the 
truest men of letters whom our country has produced. 
Genuine in impulse, fervid in temper, impressed but not 
overwhelmed by the sad and tragic conditions of his life, 
and sincerely moved to write beautifully, he exhibits lyric 
power hardly to be found in any other American. 

All this, however, seems hardly national. Lanier's 
career was wholly American, and almost wholly South- 
ern; the emotional temper with which he was filled must 
have been quickened by experience only in our own 
country. The things with which he chose to deal, how- 
ever, might have come to him anywhere. The very fact 
which keeps him permanently from popularity is perhaps 
this lack of local perception, as distinguished from a temper 
which could not help being of local origin. So if Lanier's 
work tells us anything about Southern hterature, it only 
tells us, a little more surely than that of Hayne, or of Tim- 
rod, how the tragic convulsion of our Civil War waked in 
the South a kind of passion which America had hardly 
exhibited before, 
contem- Since the Civil War, such Hterature as has come from 

Southern the South has been chiefly in the form of novels and short 
Writers. storics. Thcsc, usually published in the Northern maga- 
zines, have faithfully and sympathetically reproduced 
Southern scenery and dialect. They have distinguished 
themselves from other local stories by a greater courtliness 
and pathos of mood, combined with skill and conscien- 
tiousness in the matter of style. In this manner Thomas 
Nelson Page (1853-) has written of Virginia; Charles 
Egbert Craddock (1850-) of the Tennessee moun- 



The South 411 

taineers; James Lane Allen (1849-) of Kentucky; 
George Washington Cable (1844-) of the Creoles 
of Louisiana; and Joel Chandler Harris (1848-), 
whose stories of "Uncle Remus" (1880, 1884) are nowa- 
days probably almost as familiar as Uncle Tom's Cabin, 
has vividly depicted the negroes of Georgia. 

We are thus compelled to feel that our Southern 
regions have as yet produced little if any more significant 
literature than the North had produced before 1832. 
Since the Civil War the social and economic condition of Summary, 
the South has been too disturbed for final expression. 
As yet, therefore, the South presents little to vary the gen- 
eral outlines of literature in America. The few Southern 
poets, however, who have phrased the emotion aroused 
by the Civil War which swept their earlier civilization out 
of existence, reveal a lyric fervor hardly yet equalled in 
the North. As one thinks of these poets, of Hayne, of 
Timrod, and of Lanier, one begins to wonder whether they 
may not perhaps forerun a spirit which shall give a new 
beauty and power to American letters in the future. 



VI 

THE WEST 

References 

General: Hamlin Garland, "The Literary Emancipation of the 
West," Forum, October, 1893 ; Meredith Nicholson, The Hoosiers, 
New York: Macmillan, 1900 ("National Studies in American Letters") ; 
W. H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley, Cin- 
cinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1891 ; G. E. Woodberry, America in Lit- 
erature, New York: Harpers, 1903, pp. 150-182. 

Works: Artemus Ward's complete \yorks in one volume are published 
by the G. W. Dillingham Company, New York; Nasby's works are 
published by Lee & Shepard, Boston ; Phwnixiana, by D. Appleton and 
Company, New York, 1903 ; Field's works, 12 vols., New York : Scribner, 
1900-1901 ; Bret Harte's works, 19 vols., Boston : Houghton, 1900-1903. 
Joaquin Miller's books were published by Roberts Brothers, Boston ; 
Riley's, by the Bowen-Merrill Co., Indianapolis ; Dunne's earlier books, 
by Small, Maynard & Co., Boston; his later works by Russell, New York. 
Eggleston's works are in the hands of no single publisher. 

Biography and Criticism : There is a life of Bret Harte by H. W. 
Boynton (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1903), and of Eugene 
Field by Slason Thompson (2 vols.. New York: Scribner, 1901) ; for 
biographies of the other authors mentioned in this chapter, see the dic- 
tionaries of American biography. For criticism, see the reviews and 
critical notices referred to in Poole's Index. 

Bibliography : For lists of titles, with dates, see Foley or Whitcomb. 

A HUNDRED years ago the greater part of our country 
was still a wilderness. To-day, it is said, almost every 
available acre throughout the United States is in private 
ownership; and regions which within living memory 
were still unbroken prairie are the sites of cities more 
populous than New York or Boston was fifty years ago. 

412 



The West 413 

From influences quite beyond human control, the energies 
of Western people have accordingly devoted themselves to 
the conquest of Nature on a scale hitherto unattempted. 
No wonder the most salient trait of our great confused 
West seems enthusiasm for material prosperity as distin- 
guished from spiritual or intellectual ideals. Yet there 
are such things as Western ideals, different from the older 
ideals of New England, but not for that less admirable. 
Not only have these ideals existed, but occasionally, as 
in the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, they have revealed 
themselves in forms so admirable as to make the West 
seem a region from which in time to come we may hope 
for superbly imaginative expression. 

As yet, however, the West has not developed any 
such unity of character as has marked our elder re- 
gions. So far as Western character has found expression 
in serious literature, this has consisted chiefly of short 
stories which set forth the local characteristics of various 
Western regions. In general, the energy of Western lit- 
erature is still confined to popular journalism. Mainly 
from this source, the comic columns of Western news- 
papers, there has developed a kind of native expression 
hardly recognized forty years ago, and now popularly 
supposed to be our most characteristic. This is what is 
commonly called American humor. 

The chief trait of American humor we have already American 
found to be a grave confusion of fact and nonsense like that "™°'^' 
with which Frankhn records the "grand leap of the 
whale. . . up the Falls of Niagara. " In like manner, 
we have observed, Irving, Lowell, and Holmes are apt 
to mingle sober truth with wild extravagance. All these 
men of letters, however, humorists though they were. 



414 The Rest of the Story 

possessed such sense of personal dignity and such literary 
accomplishment as to impress on early American humor 
a distinction of style, and to animate it with a mood which 
is usually serious and often noble. 

The form which American humor has been developing 
in Western newspapers has other traits. The chief of 
these, which is inherent in the popularity of Western 
journalism, is hard to define, but palpable and vital. It 
amounts to a general assumption that everybody whom 
you address will entirely understand whatever you say. A 
familiar example of this temper pervaded a kind of enter- 
tainment frequent in America thirty or forty years ago — 
the negro minstrel shows. In these a number of men 
would daub their faces with burnt cork, and sitting in a 
row would sing songs and tell stories. Underlying both 
songs and stories was an assumption that everybody who 
heard what the performers said was familiar with every- 
thing they knew — not only with human nature and local 
allusions, but also with the very names and personal 
oddities of the individuals they mentioned. To phrase 
the thing colloquially, the whole performance assumed 
that we were all in the crowd. This trait pervades the 
"funny" columns of American newspapers, particularly 
in the West; and it is mostly from these columns that 
recent American humor has emerged into what approach 
it has made to literary form. 

At least three familiar humorous figures, no longer with 
us, typify the kind of literary impulse now in mind. The 
first was George Horatio Derby (1823-1861), an army 
officer, born of a good Massachusetts family, who spent a 
good deal of his life in the West, particularly in California. 
Here, under the name of John Phoenix, he took to writing 



TJie West 415 

for the newspapers whimsical letters, two volumes of which 
had been collected and published before his death. In their 
day the Squihob Papers (1855) and Phcenixiana (1859), 
which grotesquely satirize life in California during the early 
days of American control there, were popular all over the 
country. To-day one feels their extravagance more than 
their fun; the whole thing seems overdone. John Phoenix, 
however, was undoubtedly among the earliest humorists 
of a school which has tended to produce better and better 
work. 

About ten years after his time there came into notice 
a man whose name is still familiar both at home and in 
England. This was Charles Farrar Browne (1834- 
1867). Born in Maine, first a printer, later a newspaper 
man, he drifted to Ohio, where about 1858 he became a re- 
porter on the Cleveland Plain Dealer. For this he began 
to write, over the signature of Artemus Ward, humorous 
articles which carried both the Plain Dealer and his pseu- 
donym all over the country. Just before the Civil War he Artemus 
took charge of a comic weekly newspaper in New York. 
The war brought this venture to an end ; for the rest of his 
life he was a "funny" lecturer. Like the humor of John 
Phoenix, that of Artemus Ward now seems tediously ex- 
travagant; and the essence of it lies in his inextricable con- 
fusion of fact and nonsense. He often assumes the char- 
acter of a travelling showman, who has interviews not only 
with typical individuals of various classes, but with all sorts 
of notables, from Brigham Young to Queen Victoria. 
With these he talks on intimate terms; the fun lies chiefly 
in the grotesque incongruity between the persons concerned 
and what they say. Like Lowell in the Biglow Papers, 
he emphasizes his jests with mad misspelling and the Hke; 



416 The Rest of the Story 

but all his vagaries cannot conceal the sober confusion 
of literal statement and palpable absurdity which groups 
him, despite his errors of taste, with Lowell and Irving 
and the other humorists of our best literature. 

In the history of American newspaper humor the gro- 
tesque extravagance of Artemus Ward stands midway 
between that of John Phoenix and that of a writer, who, 
though no longer alive, seems much nearer our own time. 
David Ross Locke (i 833-1 888) was born in a country 
village of New York, Like Artemus Ward, he was a 
printer, and later a reporter; later still he was editor of a 
local newspaper in Ohio. At the beginning of the Civil 
War he began to write political satires over the signature 
of Petroleum V. Nasby. The absurdity of this pseudonym 
typifies the pervasive absurdity of his misspelt and other- 

Nasby. wisc ecccntric style. His satire, however, which was 
widely circulated at a moment of national crisis, dealt with 
matters of significance. He had come intimately to know 
the border regions between the North and the South. He 
was a strong Union man; and with all the grotesque 
mannerisms of newspaper humor he satirized Southern 
character and those phases of Northern character which 
sympathized with the constitutional contentions of the 
Confederacy. So in its day Nasby's work had political 
importance ; it really helped sohdify and strengthen Union 
sentiment. 

Mr. Dooiey. Thougli, in general, American newspaper humor is 
not so significant, it has retained from Nasby's time the 
sort of contagious vitality found throughout his writings; 
and in one or two cases it has lately emerged into some- 
thing better. The chief figure in recent journalistic hu- 
mor is FiNLEY Peter Dunne (1867-). From a Chicago 



The West 417 

newspaper office, Mr. Dunne, in the irresistible brogue of 
"Mr. Dooley, " an Irish saloon-keeper, has commented 
upon public affairs, often paying his respects to princes 
and great rulers, with a shrewd satire comparable to 
that of Lowell's Biglow Papers. 

Chicago, whence these last examples of newspaper humor Chicago 
have come, is the chief centre of material activity in the 
Middle West. The consequent intellectual activity there 
has been great. We have already touched on the remark- 
able expression of this in the World's Fair of 1893. And 
though, in general, the intellectual life of Chicago has 
hardly reached the stage of memorable hterary expression, 
it has produced two or three writers whom we cannot fail 
to notice. 

Eugene Field (1850-1895), a journaHst in various Field. 
Western cities, who after 1883 lived in Chicago, proved in 
his later work something more than a writer of ephemeral 
fun. Among his collected writings, which include essays, 
tales, and poems, the verses about children are perhaps 
the most popular. In these, of which "Little Boy Blue" 
is a good example, Field avoids those lapses from good 
taste which mar some of his other work, and at the same 
time he is more than usually simple and tender. Quite 
as important for our purpose, however, are the pages, 
often extravagantly remote from seriousness, in which 
Field reveals his love for such sound literature as the Odes 
of Horace or the English and Scottish popular ballads. 
For all his eccentric and careless vivacity, these pages 
remind us. Field was at heart a true man of letters. 

More obviously so is Henry Blake Fuller (1857-), Fuller, 
who first became known as the writer of a charming Ital- Moody*^ 
ian fantasy. The Chevalier oj Pensieri-Vani (1890). Since 



418 



The Rest of the Story 



that time he has written some vivid novels of Chicago hfe, 
as well as other books about the Italy to which he has 
turned for relief from the superficial materialism of the 
Illinois metrop6lis. A similar discontent with the mate- 
rial grossness of his surroundings animates the interest- 
ing novels of Robert Herrick (1868-), a graduate of 
Harvard who has for some years been Professor of English 
at the University of Chicago. In discussing New England, 
we touched on the fact that Harvard has lately been sterile 
in the matter of literary production. In marked contrast 
to this sterility is the fact that not only Professor Herrick's 
fiction, but the genuine, if inarticulate poetry of another 
Harvard graduate, William Vaughan Moody (1869-), 
have come from active teachers in the one great American 
university which, when they made their reputations, was 
not ten years old. 

The Middle West has meanwhile produced literature 
elsewhere than in its chief material centre. From Indiana, 
for example, have come the widely but ephemerally pop- 
ular historical novels of General Lew Wallace (1827-); 
and the work of that sound historical writer, and novehst of 
"Hoosier" life, Edward Eggleston (183 7-1 902). From 
Indiana, too, has come the broadly popular work of James 
Whitcomb Riley (1853-), who, beginning, like Eugene 
Field, with journalism, has been chiefly known since 
1875 for Hoosier lyrics of an admirable simplicity, humor, 
and pathos. From a man born in St. Louis, though 
now resident in the East, Winston Churchill (1871-), 
have lately come the novels of American history, Richard 
Carvel (1899), The Crisis (1901), and The Crossing (1904), 
which have been most widely read. One might name 
many more industrious and worthy Western writers; but 



Tlie West 419 

they would hardly add definite features to the indistinct 
picture. 

The Pacific slope, however, is a region as different from caiiforu a 
the Middle West— the West of tradition— as the West is 
from the Revolutionary colonies. And California has 
something like a literature of its own. Of the earlier 
Californian writers the chief was certainly Francis Bret 
Harte (1839-1902). Born in Albany, New York, he 
found himself at the age of fifteen in California. There 
he taught school and tried journalism until 1868, when he 
became editor of the Overland Monthly. In the second 
number of this journal was published "The Luck of Roar- 
ing Camp." This, which was speedily followed by "The 
Outcasts of Poker Plat," cstabhshed Bret Harte's reputa- 
tion as a writer of short stories. Only two years later, in 
1870, he attained similar success in verse by writing "The 
Heathen Chinee." Soon after this he removed to the 
East, whence he presently went on to England, and there 
spent the rest of his life. 

Bret Harte continued writing Californian stories to the Bret Harte. 
end. He never surpassed his beginnings ; but he rarely fell 
much below them. The nineteen volumes of his collected 
works have the unusual charm of such vitahty and vivacity 
that you can read through volume after volume without 
fatigue. And they record, in skilfully artistic form, the 
temper of the days when the bolder spirits of America were 
reducing to their control the lazy old Spanish colony which 
is now among the most American of the United States. 

Since Bret Harte left California, other writers there have other 
set forth similar and later phases of Californian life. The writers"'^'' 
verses of Joaquin Miller (1841-) — Songs 0} the Sierras 
(1871) and his frequent later volumes — have a wild lyric 



420 The Rest of the Story 

quality rather Californian than Western. Gelett Bur- 
gess (1866-), editor of The Lark, and author of the Purple 
Cow, has combined engaging nonsense with good-natured 
satire in a really novel way; and Wallace Irwin (187 5-), 
in the Love Sonnets 0} a Hoodlum (1902), has humorously 
effected a seemingly impossible fusion of severe hterary 
form and feeling with the wildest extravagance of dialect. 
And California has recently produced at least two re- 
markable writers of fiction. The novels of Frank Norris 
(1870-1903), obviously modelled on those of Zola, have 
starthng power; and the stories of Alaska and of the sea 
by Jack London (1876-), obviously modelled on the 
style of Kipling, have power enough not to seem un- 
worthy of their original. 

Californian literature, in brief, has a quality which some- 
times makes it seem singularly promising. From the con- 
ditions of life there, and the expression which these con- 
ditions have already evoked, one may expect work which 
shall combine with the freshness of feeling and the keen 
sense of fact characteristic of America a kind of emotional 
freedom — of warm and unrestrained artistic impulse — 
hitherto prevented elsewhere by an intensity of moral 
tradition from which the atmosphere of the Pacific slope 
is free. But as yet this temper has not reached any final 
stage of expression. 

Partly from Californian influences, meanwhile, partly 
from Southern, and partly from those of the East, there 
has emerged the one remaining American man of letters 
who now deserves separate consideration. 



VII 

MARK TWAIN 

References 

Works : Mark Twain's works, originally published by Charles L. 
Webster & Co., are now brought out in a uniform edition by the Harpers. 
For a list of the titles, before 1895, with dates, see Foley, pp. 50-52. 

Biography and Criticism : For biography, see any good dictionary 
of American biography; for criticism, the magazine articles and reviews, 
which can readily be found by means of Poole's Index. 

Selections: Stedman and Hutchinson, IX, 290-307. 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, "Mark Twain," Life. 
(1835-), after an apprenticeship to a printer, became a 
pilot on the Mississippi River in 1851. Later he tried 
mining, and still later journalism, in California. Thence 
he removed to Hawaii, and finally to Hartford, Connecti- 
cut, where he lived till lately. In 1884 he founded the 
publishing firm of C. L. Webster & Company; he lost 
heavily by its failure. His subsequent labor to pay its 
debts suggests the similarly heroic efforts of Sir Walter 
Scott. His first book. The Jumping Frog and Other 
Sketches, came out in 1867, Innocents Abroad in 1869, 
Adventures 0} Tom Sawyer in 1876, Life on the Missis- 
sippi in 1883, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, 
Pudd^n-head Wilson in 1894, and Personal Recollections 
0} Joan of Arc in 189 5- 1896. 

The earlier work of Mark Twain seemed broadly comic Humor. 
— only another manifestation of that rollicking sort of 
journalistic fun which is generally ephemeral. As the 

421 



422 



The Rest of the Stor/j 



years have passed, liowever, he has slowly distinguished 
himself more and more from anyone else. No other living 
writer, for one thing, so comjjletely exemjjlines the kind of 
humor whieh is most eharaeteristieally Ameriean — a 
shrewd sense of fact expressing itself in an inextricable 
confusion of literal statement and wild extravagance, 
uttered with ^no lapse from 
what seems unmoved gravity of 
manner. 

Hut this is by no means the sum 
of him, nor yet his deepest merit. 
His more careful books show a 
grasp of his subject, a power of 
composition on the grand scale, 
una])proached by any other pop- 
ular American. I'or all its faults 
of su])erricial taste, and for all its 
extravagance of dialect, Jlucklc- 
hcrry Finn proves, as one com- 
pares it with its rough material, 
carelessly collected in Lijc on the 
Mississippi, nothing short of a masteri)iece. And it proves 
as well, when one has read it over and over again, to be 
among the few books in any literature which i)reserve 
something like a comprehensive picture of an entire state 
of society. In this aspect it is Odyssean, just as Don 
Quixote is. There are moods when one is tempted to call 
it, despite its shortcomings, the masterpiece of literature in 
America. 

It was this ])ower of construction on a large scale, com- 
bined with profound human sympathy, which made more 
than one competent critic recognize Mark Twain's hand 




^^ C^^-^^-^^^t^ 



Mark Twain 423 

in ihc originally anonymous Personal Recollections oj Joan 
oj Arc. In this he showed himself an historical novelist 
of positive importance. His more recent work has been 
apt to have the increasing seriousness of his honorable 
maturity. He has fearlessly written of public matters, 
and of various social and philosophic follies, and, whether 
you agree with him or not, you cannot fail to recognize his 
manly honesty, his unbroken vigor of thought and phrase, 
and his rij)c individuality. His persistent humor ]>roves 
less and less a matter of wildness or extravagance. It is his 
peculiar method of courageously commenting on life. 

And throughout his work one finds innumerable turns of Summary 
thought and of phrase which could proceed only from one 
whose whole being was born and developed not in one 
part of America or another, but surely and only in America. 
N(j one was ever, in the better sense of the word, a more 
instinctive and whole-souled man of the people. No one 
was ever more free from the spiritual vulgarity, as dis- 
tinguished from mere errors of taste, which sometimes 
makes men of the people seem coarse. No one was ever 
more broadly human — sometimes with a broadness which 
the fastidious may lament, oftener with a breadth of 
sympathy which should shame whoever fails to share it. 
Mark Twain is often odd, but never eccentric. There is 
nowhere a sounder heart or a more balanced head than 
reveal themselves throughout the work of this man with 
whom none but Americans can quite feel complete fellow- 
ship, and with whom no true American can fail to feel it. 

Walt Whitman has sometimes been called the most 
characteristic of Americans. But there can be little doubt 
that, long after the whims of Whitman have obscured 
what power was in him, the sanity and vigor of Mark 



American- 
ism. 



424 The Rest of the Story 

Twain will persistently show what the American spirit 
Real of his time really and truly was. This spirit has been 

broadly popular, odd in its expression, none too reverent 
in phrase or manner, often deceptive, consequently, to those 
whom phrase and manner may readily mislead, but full 
of good sense, full of kindly humor, and, above all, eager, 
while recognizing all the perversities of fact, to persevere 
towards righteousness. 



VIII 

CONCLUSION 

It is obviously too soon to generalize safely about those 
more recent phases of literature in America on which we 
have just been touching. It is not too soon, however, 
to suggest some general considerations which arise as we 
consider the literary history of America as a whole. 

This literary history of America is the story, under new 
conditions, of those ideals which a common language has 
compelled America, almost unawares, to share with Eng- 
land. These ideals which for three hundred years Amer- 
ica and England have cherished, alike yet apart, are ideals 
of morality and of government — of right and of rights. 
General as these phrases must seem — common at iirst 
glance to the serious moments of all men everywhere — 
they have, for us of English-speaking race, a meaning 
peculiarly our own. The rights for which Englishmen and 
Americans alike have been eager to fight and to die are no 
prismatic fancies gleaming through clouds of conflicting 
logic and metaphor; they are that living body of customs 
and duties and privileges which experience has proved 
favorable to prosperity and to righteousness. 

Threatened throughout history, both from without and 
from within, these rights can be preserved by nothing 
short of eternal vigilance. In this we have been faithful, 
until our deepest ideal of public duty, which marks Eng- 
lishmen and Americans apart from others, and side by side, 

425 



426 The Rest of the Story 

is to protect our ancestral rights, not only from invasion 
or aggression attempted by other races than ours, but also 
from the internal ravages both of reaction and of revolu- 
tion. In loyalty to this conception of duty, the nobler 
minds of England and of America have always been at 
one. Though to careless eyes the two countries have long 
seemed parted by a chasm wider even than the turbulent 
and foggy Atlantic, the differences which have kept Eng- 
land and America so long distinct have arisen from no 
more fatal cause than unwitting and temporary conflicts of 
their common law. The origin of both countries, as we 
know them to-day, was the England of Queen Elizabeth, 
with all its spontaneity, all its enthusiasm, all its untired 
versatility. From this origin England has sped faster and 
further than America. Throughout two full centuries 
America and England have consequently quarrelled, 
with faithful honesty, as to just what rights and liberties 
were truly sanctioned by the law which has remained 
common to both. 

How their native tempers began to diverge we have 
already seen. During the seventeenth century England 
proceeded from its spontaneous, enthusiastic Elizabethan 
versatility, through the convulsions of the Civil Wars, to 
Cromwell's Commonwealth; and from the Common- 
wealth through the baseness of the Restoration and the re- 
newing health of the Revolution of 1688, to that state of 
parliamentary government which still persists. English 
literature meanwdiile proceeded from the age of Shakspere, 
through the age of Milton, to the age of Dryden. During 
this same seventeenth century — the century of American 
immigration — American history felt no such convulsion 
as the wars and tumults which destroyed Elizabethan 



Conclusion 427 

England. American character, which from the begin- 
ning possessed its still persistent power of absorbing im- 
migration, accordingly preserved much of the spontaneity, 
the enthusiasm, and the versatility transported hither 
from the mother-country when Virginia and New England 
were founded. So far as literature went, meantime, 
seventeenth-century America expressed itself only in occa- 
sional historical records, and in a deluge of Calvinistic 
theology. Partly to these, and still more to the devout 
source from which they welled, is due the instinctive de- 
votion of America to such ideals of absolute right and 
truth as were inherent in the passionate idealism of the 
Puritans. 

It was here that America most distinctly parted from the 
mother-country. In England, the Puritan Commonwealth, 
with its nobly futile aspiration towards absolute right, so 
entwined itself about the life of Cromwell that when he 
died it fell. In America a similar commonwealth, already 
deeply rooted when Cromwell was still a sturdy country 
gentleman of St. Ives, flourished long after his relics had 
been cast out of Westminster Abbey. Generation by 
generation, the immemorial custom of America, wherein 
America has steadily discerned the features of its ancestral 
rights and Hberties, grew insensibly to sanction more 
abstract ideals than ever long persisted in England. ' 

Whoever will thus interpret the seventeenth century 
need be at little pains to understand the century which fol- 
lowed. The political events of this eighteenth century — ■ 
the century of American independence — forced England 
into prolonged international isolation; and this, combined 
with reactionary desire for domestic order, bred in British 
character that insular conservatism still typified by the 



428 The Rest of the Story 

portly integrity of John Bull. English literature mean- 
while proceeded from the Addisonian urbanity of Queen 
Anne's time, through the ponderous Johnsonian formality 
which satisfied the subjects of George II, to the masterly 
publicism of Burke and the contagious popularity of 
Burns. 

Since eighteenth-century America was politically free 
from the conditions which so highly developed the peculiar 
eccentricities of England, there is no wonder that Amer- 
ican character still retained the spontaneity, the enthu- 
siasm, and the versatility of the elder days when it had 
shared these traits with the English. Nor is there any won- 
der that Americans went on traditionally cherishing the 
fervent idealism of the immigrant Puritans, wherein for a 
while the ancestral English ideals of right and of rights 
had fused. Unwittingly lingering in its pristine state, the 
native character of America became less and less like the 
character which historical forces were irresistibly mould- 
ing in the mother-country. The traditional law of Amer- 
ica seemed on its surface less and less like the more dogged 
and rigid system which was becoming the traditional law 
of England. Despite their common language, neither of 
the kindred peoples, separated not only by the wastes of 
the ocean but also by the forgotten lapse of five generations, 
could rightly understand the other. The inevitable result 
was the American Revolution. ' ■ 

The same causes which wTought this imperial disunion 
had tended to alter the hterary character of America. 
American theology had already evaporated in metaphysi- 
cal abstraction; its place, as the principal phase of Ameri- 
can expression, had been taken by politics. Of this, no 
doubt, the animating ideal was not so much that of moral- 



Conclusion 429 

ity as that of law. Yet America would not have been 
America unless these ancestral ideals had remained 
blended. A yearning for absolute truth, an unbroken 
faith in abstract ideals, is what makes distinctly national 
the political utterances of the American Revolution. The 
love of abstract right which pervades them sprang straight 
from that aspiration towards absolute truth which had 
animated the grim idealism of the Puritans. 

So came the nineteenth century — the century of Ameri- 
can nationality, when, for all their community of language 
and of ideals, England and America have believed 
themselves mutually foreign. English history proceeded 
from the extreme isolation which ended at Waterloo, 
through the constitutional revolution of the Reform Bill 
to the reign of Queen Victoria. What the future may de- 
cide to have been the chief features of this Victorian epoch, 
it is still too soon to assert; yet the future can hardly 
fail to remember how, throughout these sixty and more 
years, England has continually developed in two seem- 
ingly divergent ways. At home, on the one hand, it has 
so tended towards democracy that already the political 
power of the English masses probably exceeds that of the 
American. In its world relations, on the other hand, 
England has become imperial to a degree undreamed of 
when Queen Victoria ascended the throne. Wherever the 
influence of England extends to-day, democracy and em- 
pire go hand in hand. 

Throughout this nineteenth century America has had 
the Western Hemisphere almost to itself. This it has 
dominated with increasing material power, believing all the 
while that it could keep free from entanglement with 
other regions of the earth. From this youthful dream it 



430 The Rest of the Story 

has at last been rudely awakened. In the dawning of a 
new century it finds itself — like England, at once demo- 
cratic and imperial — inevitably confronted with world- 
conflict; either its ideals must prevail, or they must perish. 
After three centuries of separation, then, England and 
America are once more side by side. With them, in union, 
lies the hope of imperial democracy. 

It is only during the nineteenth century — the century of 
American nationality — that America has brought forth 
literature. First appearing in the Middle States, this soon 
developed more seriously in New England, whose mental 
life, so active at first, had lain comparatively dormant for 
almost a hundred years. These two phases of American 
literary expression — that of older New York and that of 
renascent New England — are the only ones which may as 
yet be regarded as complete. They have been the chief 
subject of our study. On the impression which they 
have left with us must rest our estimate of what the liter- 
ature produced in America has hitherto signified. 

To define this impression, we may glance back at what 
the nineteenth century added to the literature of England. 
First came the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge and 
Shelley and Keats and Byron — a poetry, for all its indi- 
vidual variety, aflame with the spirit of world-revolution. 
Then, just after Waterloo, came those bravely ideal retro- 
spective romances which have immortalized the name of 
Scott. The later literature of England has expressed the 
meanings of life discerned and felt by men whose mature 
years have fallen within the democratic and imperial reign 
of Queen Victoria. This literature includes the great mod- 
ern novelists — Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot, 
with their host of contemporaries and followers; it in- 



Conclusion 431 

eludes the poetry of Tennyson, and of the Brownings, and 
of more ; it includes a wealth of serious prose, the work of 
Macaulay, of Carlyle, of Ruskin, of Newman, of Matthew 
Arnold, and of numberless others; it includes the studied 
and fastidious refinement of Stevenson; it still happily 
includes the scope and power of writers now living. 

In the nineteenth century English hterature began with 
a passionate outburst of aspiring romantic poetry; it 
passed into an era of retrospective romantic prose; it pro- 
ceeded to a stage where, for all the merit of persistent 
poetry, the chief fact seems to have been fiction dealing 
mostly with contemporary life; its serious prose, all the 
while, tended more and more to dwell on the problems of 
the times; and these surely underlie the utterances of its 
latest masters. The more one considers what the century 
has added to English literature, the more one marvels at 
its riches. Yet all the while one grows aware of something 
which, if not a loss, is at least a change. Throughout 
the century, English letters have slowly lapsed away from 
the grace of personal distinction. The literature of nine- 
teenth-century England, like its history, expresses an 
irresistible advance of democracy. 

Political democracy, no doubt, declared itself earlier and 
more outspokenly in America than in England. So far as 
literature is concerned, on the other hand, the first thirty 
years of the nineteenth century excited from America much 
less democratic utterances than came from the revolution- 
ary poets of the mother-country. If you doubt this, com- 
pare Brockden Brown with Wordsworth, Irving with Cole- 
ridge, Cooper with Shelley, Bryant with Byron. What 
that earlier literature of the Middle States chiefly certifies 
of American character is that, whatever our vagaries of 



432 The Best of the Stonj 

occasional speech, we are at heart disposed, with good old 
English common-sense, to follow those lines of conduct 
which practice has proved safe and which prudence has 
pronounced admirable. The earlier literature of the 
Middle States has another trait which seems national: 
its sensitiveness of artistic conscience shows Americans 
generally to be more alive to artistic duty than EngHshmen 
have often been. The first literary utterances of inexpe- 
rienced America were marked by no wildness or vagary; 
they showed, rather, an almost timid loyalty to the tra- 
ditions of excellence. 

A few years later came what so far seems the nearest 
approach of America to lasting literature — the final utter- 
ances of New England during the years of its Renaissance, 
which, broadly speaking, were contemporary with the first 
half of the reign of Queen Victoria. The new life had be- 
gun, of course, somewhat earlier. It had first shown itself 
in the awakening of New England oratory and scholarship, 
and in the ardor which stirred Unitarianism to break the 
fetters of Calvinistic dogma. Scholarship bore fruit in 
the later works of the New England historians. Unitari- 
anism tended, through Transcendentalism, to militant, 
disintegrating reform. Amid these freshening intellectual 
surroundings appeared some men whose names seem des- 
tined to live in the records of our literature. The chief 
of these were Emerson and Whittier and Longfellow and 
Lowell and Holmes and Hawthorne. If you compare 
them with the writers who in their time were most emi- 
nent in England — with Dickens, Thackeray, and George 
Eliot, with Tennyson and the Brownings, with Carlyle and 
Ruskin, with Newman and Matthew Arnold — you can 
hardly help feehng a difference. 



Conclusion 433 

One phase of this difference soon grows clear. Though 
the writers of renascent New England were generally better 
in prose than in poetry — and thus resembled their Eng- 
lish contemporaries— their spirit was rather like that 
which had animated the fervent English poetry of a gener- 
ation before. Accepting the revolutionary doctrine that 
human nature is not evil but good, they confidently hoped 
that illimitable development was at hand for a humanity 
finally freed from the shackles of outworn custom. In 
this faith and hope the men of the New England Renais- 
sance were sustained by a fact never true of any other 
civilized society than that from which they sprang. For 
more than two hundred years national inexperience had 
protected American character from such distortion as hu- 
man nature always suffers under the pressure of dense 
population. Accordingly, with a justified enthusiasm, the 
literary leaders of New England, full of the earnest ideal- 
ism inseparable from their Puritan ancestry, and finally 
emancipated from the dogmas which had reviled human- 
ity, fervently proclaimed democracy. Here, at first, their 
temper seems to linger behind that of the mother-country. 
Such undimmed confidence as theirs in human nature was 
beginning to fade from English literature before the 
death of Scott. 

Yet these New England writers were no mere exotic sur- 
vivors of the days when English Romanticism was fervid. 
They were all true Americans; and this they could not have 
been without an almost rustic limitation of worldly knowl- 
edge, without a shrewd sense of fact which should at once 
correct the errors of such ignorance and check the vagaries 
of their idealism, or without exacting artistic conscience. 
Their devotion to the ideals of right and of rights came 



434 The Rest of the Story 

straight from ancestral England. Their spontaneous apti- 
tude for idealism, their enthusiastic love for abstractions 
and for absolute truth, they had derived, too, from the 
Elizabethan Puritans whose traits they had hereditarily 
preserved. What most surely marked them apart was the 
quality of their eager faith in democracy. To them this 
was no untested dream ; it was rather a truth confirmed by 
the national inexperience of their still uncrowded country. 
Hence sprang the phase of their democratic temper which 
still seems most precious and most pregnant. 

The spirit of European democracy has been dominated 
by blind devotion to an enforced equality. In many 
American utterances you may doubtless find thoughtless 
assertion of the same dogma. Yet if you will ponder on the 
course of American history, and still more if you will learn 
intimately to know those more eminent American men of 
letters who remain our teachers, you must grow to feel 
that American democracy has a wiser temper, still its own. 
The national ideal of America has never yet denied or even 
repressed the countless variety of human worth and power. 
It has urged only that men should enjoy liberty within the 
range of law. It has resisted both lingering and innovating 
tyranny; but all the while it has kept faithful to the prin- 
ciple that, so far as public safety may permit, each of us 
has an inalienable right to strive for excellence. In the 
presence of approved excellence it has remained humble. 

The history of such future as we can now discern 
must be that of a growing world-democracy. And 
those who welcome this prospect are apt to hold that 
our most threatening future danger lurks in those 
dogged systems of authority which still strive to strangle 
human aspiration. No doubt these are dangerous, yet 



Conclusion 435 

sometimes there must seem even deeper danger in that 
phase of democracy itself which hates and condemns ex- 
cellence. If in the conflicts to come, democracy shall over- 
power excellence, or if excellence, seeking refuge in freshly 
imperious assertion of authority, shall prove democracy 
another futile dream, the ways before us are dark. The 
more one dreads such darkness, the more gleams of coun- 
sel and help one may find in the simple, hopeful literature 
of inexperienced, renascent New England. There, for a 
while, the warring ideals of democracy and of excellence 
were once reconciled, dwelling confidently together in 
som_e earthly semblance of peace. 



INDEX 



Abbott, Jacob, 194- 

Abbott, John S.C., 305. 

Adams, Brooks, 386. 

Adams, Charles Francis, 386. 

Adams, Henry, 386. 

Adams, John, 5, 69, 99, 102, 202, 203. 

Adams, Samuel, 70, 99, 102, 202. 

Addison, Joseph, 59, 60, 63, 428. 

Alcott, Amos Bronson, 247, 267-269, 

273- 

Alcott, Louisa May, 194, 392. 

Aldrich, James, 172. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 391, 392. 

Allan, John, 170. 

Allen, James Lane, 411. 

Almanacs, 74. 

American Academy of Arts and Sci- 
ences, 212. 

American Philosophical Society, 72, 
85,212. 

American Revolution, 56, 68, 69, 92- 
97,428. 

Ames, Fisher, 102. 

Anne, Queen, 59, 6r, 428. 

Anthology Club, 213, 241. 

Anthon, Charles, 172. 

Antislavery, 250, 275-288. 

Atlantic Monthly, 298-304, 324, 330, 
3.S5, 358, 390,392,396. 

Austen, Jane, 118, 159. 

Bacon, Francis, 2, 29, 35, 70. 
Bancroft, George, 222, 223. 
Barlow, Joel, 106, 107. 
Bartlett, Sidney, 335. 
Bates, Arlo, 393. 
"Bay Psalm Book," 33, 36, 37. 
Beecher, Lyman, 285. 
Beverley, Robert, 73. 



Bible, 2, 3, 19, 20, 76. 

Blackstone, Sir William, 68, 100. 

Blair, Robert, 167. 

Blenheim, battle of, 54, 55. 

Bogart, Elizabeth, 172. 

Boker, George Henry, 181, 369. 

Boston Athensum, 213, 241. 

Boston News Letter, 74. 

Boswell, James, 62, 205. 

Bowdoin College, 285, 305, 306, 340. 

Bradford, Governor William, 23, 28, 

34,35,46,214. 
Bradstreet, Mrs. Anne, 33, 39, 40 

lOI. 

Briggs, Charles Frederick, 172. 

Brook Farm, 250-252, 263. 

Brooks, Phillips, 385. 

Brown, Charles Brockden, 129-135 
iSS. 156, 157, 159, 161, 168, 180, 
183, 184, 220, 232, 240, 347, 349, 

431- 
Brown, Thomas Dunn, 172. 
Browne, Charles Farrar, 415, 416. 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 20. 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 120, 

173. 346, 431- 
Browning, Robert, 120, 431. 
Brownson, Orestes Augustus, 248. 
Bryant, William Cullen, 158-168, 

169, 171, 181, 183, 184, 232, 240, 

316,321,431. 
Bunner, Henry Cuyler, 366, 367. 
Burgess, Gelett, 420. 
Burke, Edmund, 59, 62, 63, 69, 70, 

93,428. 
Burnett, Mrs. Frances Hodgson, 367. 
Burns, Robert, 62, 100, 428. 
Burr, Aaron, 77. 
Burton, Robert, 20, 49. 



437 



438 



Index 



Bush, George, 172. 
Butler, Samuel, 104, 106. 
Byron, Lord, 118, 119, 142, 159, 430, 
431- 

Cable, George Washington, 411. 
Calhoun, John Caldwell, 403. 
Calvin, John, 14, 15. 
Calvinism, 13, 75, So, 81, 82, 91, 230- 

232,233,338,339. 
Canada, 116. 
Carey, Henry, 172. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 171, 224, 244, 255, 

346,431- 
Century Magazine, 358, 364. 
Channing, Edward Tyrrell, 160, 213. 
Channing, William Ellery, 218, 229- 

23°. 231. 234, 235, 241, 242, 277. 
Channing, William Ellery, the young- 
er, 247, 248. 
Channing, William Henry, 247, 248. 
Charles 1, 11, 23. 
Charles H, 1 1. 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, i, 3. 
Cheever, George Barrell, 172. 
Cherbury, Lord Herbert of, 16, 29. 
Child, Francis James, 388. 
Child, Lydia Maria, 172, 15*3. 
Choate, Rufus, 207, 299. 
Churchill, Winston, 418. 
Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 172, 173, 180, 

181. 
Clarke, James Freeman, 248. 
Clay, Henry, 403. 
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 90, 

421-424. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 62, 63, 

118, 119, 155, 159, 244,430,431. 
Colton, George Hooker, 172. 
Columbia University, 72. 
Columbus Magazine, 129. 
Common Law of England, 5, 15, 16, 

27, 55. 56, 57. 58, 66, 76, 116, 117, 

122. 
Copley, John Singleton, 196, 197. 
Cooke, John Esten, 403, 404. 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 148-157, 

161, 168, 183, 184, 232, 321, 431. 
Cotton, John, 24, 29, 34, 42. 



Cowper, William, 62, 167, 183. 
Craddock, Charles Egbert, 410-411. 
Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 172, 

247. 
Crawford, Francis Marion, 398. 
Croaker Papers, 162. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 11, 12, 426, 427. 
Curtis, George William, 181, 252, 

360, 363. 

Dana, Charles Anderson, 232, 360, 

362. 
Dana, Richard Henry, 160. 
Dartmouth College, 203, 207, 328. 
Davis, Richard Harding, 367. 
Defoe, Daniel, 18, 59, 61. 
Deland, Margaret, 392, 393. 
De Quincey, Thomas 159, 303. 
Derby, George Horatio, 414, 415. 
Dial, 245-250, 251, 268, 278, 298, 

299. 
Dickens, Charles, 120, 138, 171, 346, 

430- 
Dickinson, Emily, 391. 
Dickinson, John, 96. 
Dobson, Austin, 336. 
Dooley, Mr., 416, 417. 
Drake, Joseph Rodman, 162. 
Dryden, John, 18, 19, 21, 22, 35, 49, 

50,59.63,64,426. 
Dudley, Governor Joseph, 40. 
Dudley, Governor Thomas, 24, 39. 
Dunne, Finley Peter, 416, 417. 
Duyckinck, Evert Augustus, 172. 
Dwight, John Sullivan, 252. 
Dwight. Timothy, 102-104. 

Eaton, Theophilus, 46. 
Edinburgh Review, 213. 
Edwards, Jonathan, 75, 76, 77-82, 

87. 195, 231, 236. 
Eggleston, Edward, 418. 
Eliot, Charles William, 389, 390. 
Eliot, George, 120, 346, 430. 
Eliot, John, 29, 36. 
Elizabeth, Queen, 11, 15, 23, 29, 50, 

54,426. 
Elizabethan traits, 17, 20, 22, 30, 48, 

58,64. 



Index 



439 



Embury, Emma C, 172. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 171, 206. 

246, 248, 250, 254-265 270, 271, 

272, 273. 299> 300. 3oi> 2>°3, 321, 

3i^> 35°. 432. 
Endicott, Governor, 29. 
Everett, Edward, 205-207, 216, 222, 

241,255,299. 

Federalist, 100, 102, 109, no. 

Field, Eugene, 417. 

Fields, James Thomas, iSi, 303, 304 

391- 
Fiske, John, 3S7. 
Fontenoy, battle of, 54, 55. 
Fourier, 251. 
France, wars of England with, S4~ 

58. _ 
Francis, John Wakefield, 172. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 72, 73, 74, 76, 

83-91, 1S9, 199,212,413. 
Freeman, James 232. 
French ideals, 26, 27. 
French power in America, 26, 66, 67. 
French Revolution, 57,1 14. 
Freneau, Philip, 108, 109, no. 
Fruitlands, 268. 
Fuller, Henry Blake, 417,418. 
Fuller, Sarah Margaret, 172, 173, 

245, 246, 247, 250, 268, 299, 312, 

360. 
Fuller, Thomas, 18, 20, 49. 
Furness, Horace Howard, 369. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 278, 279, 

290. 
Gayarre, Charles Etienne Arthur, 

403,404. 
Gentleman's Magazine, 170. 
George I, 53. 

George H, 40, 53, 60, 428. 
George HI, 53, 54, 56, 94, 113. 
George IV, 113. 
Gibbon, Edward, 62, 219, 227. 
Gilder, Richard Watson, 365. 
Gillespie, William M., 172. 
Godey's Lady's Book, 169, 179. 
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 363. 



Godwin, Parke, i6o. 

Godwin, William, 62, 131, 183. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 60, 141, 142, 183. 

Gove, Mary, 172. 

Graham's Magazine, 171, 180. 

Grant, Robert, 393. 

Gray, Thomas, 60, 167. 

Great Awakening, 67, 69. 

Greeley, Horace, 246, 359, 360. 

Hakluyt's Voyages, 18, 20, 35. 

Hale, Edward Everett, 194, 383, 384. 

Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 162, 163, 172, 

181 
Hamilton, Alexander, 99, 102. 
Harbinger, 251. 
Harper's Magazine, 358. 
Harper's Monthly, 363, 364. 
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 

355- 

Harper's Weekly, 355, 358. 

Harris, Joel Chandler, 411. 

Harte, Francis Bret, 419. 

Hartford Wits, 102-107, io9, "O- 

Harvard, 23, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 68, 
72, lor, 192, 206, 211-212, 216, 
218, 222, 255, 269, 282, 283, 306, 
315, 327, 328, 332-334, 389, 390- 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 135, 171, 250, 
303, 305, 321, 340-350, 432. 

Hayne, Paul Henry, 403, 405, 406 

Hayne, Robert Young, 403. 

Hedge, Frederic Henry, 248. 

Henry, Patrick, 102. 

Herrick, Robert, 418. 

Hewitt, Mary E., 172. 

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 383, 
384. 

Hildreth, Richard. 223. 

Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 172, 173. 

Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 364, 365. 

Holmes, Abiel, 327 328. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 60, 171. 

181, 303, 321, 327-339, 413, 432- 
Home Jo urnal ,182. 
Hooker, Richard, 2, 20, 35. 
Hooker, Thomas, 24, 34, 79. 
Hopkinson, Francis, 96. 
Howe, Julia Ward, 382, 383, 384. 



440 



Index 



Howells, William Dean, 395-3971 

398- 
Hoyt, Ralph, 172. 
Hume, David, 60, 61. 
Humor, 89, 90, 141, 413-417. 
Hunt, Freeman, 172. 
Hutchinson, Annie, 46. 
Hutchinson, Thomas, 70, 75, 76, 102, 

215- 

Ideals, English, of Right and Rights, 
5,6. 

Indian Empire, 56, 116. 

Irving, Washington, 135, 136-147, 
155, 156, 157, 161, 167, 168, 181, 
183, 184, 222, 232, 321, 346, 348, 

349, 413. 431- 
Irving, William, 137. 
Irwin, Wallace, 420. 

James I, 1 1. 

James II, 11, 53. 

James, Henry (1811-1882), 388. 

James, Henry (1843-), 397, 398. 

James, William, 388. 

Jay, John, 99, 100, 102. 

Jefferson, Thomas, 99, 102, 121, 160, 

402. 
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 194, 392. 
John Bull, 58, 114, 351, 427,428. 
Johnson, Captain Edward, 35. 
Johnson, Samuel, 59, 60, 61, 63, 205, 

428. 
Jonson, Ben, 18, 22, 24. 

Keats, John, 109, 118, 159, 162. 
Kennedy, John Pendleton, 403, 404. 
Kirkland, Caroline Matilda, 172. 
Kirkland, William, 172. 
Knickerbocker, 180, 183. 
Knickerbocker Gallery, 181, 185. 
Knickerbocker School, 179-185, 232. 

Lamb, Charles, 62, 63, 75. 
Landor, Walter Savage, 62, 63. 
Lanier, Sidney, 403, 407-410. 
Larcom, Lucy, 194, 392. 
Lawson, James, 172. 
Lea, Henry Charles, 369. 



Lee, Robert Edward, 123. 

Lewis, ''Monk," 62, 131. 

Liberator, 278, 279, 291. 

X//e,358. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 2S7, 288. 

Literati, 169, 172-175. 

Locke, David Ross, 416. 

Locke, John, 21, 245. 

Locke, Richard Adams, 172. 

Logan, James, 73. 

London, Jack, 420. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 171, 

i8i> io^ 305-314, 315, 318, 319, 

321, 326, 341,432. 
Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 403, 

404. 
Lowell, James Russell, 171, 181, 193, 

213, 276, 30T,, 315-326, 335, 413, 

432- 
Loyalists, 93. 

Lynch, Anne Charlotte, 172. 
Lyrical Ballads, 118, 155, 157 240. 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 171, 

219, 346, 431- - 
Madison, James, 99, 102. 
Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 366. 
Marlborough, Duke of, 16, 19, 29, 55, 

56. 
Maroncelli, Piero, 172. 
Marshall, John, 100, :o2, 403. 
Mary, Queen, wife of William III, 11. 
Mary Stuart, 24. 
Massachusetts Historical Society. 

212. 
Mather, Cotton, '29, 34, 41, 42-49, 

68, 76, 87, loi, 189, 192, 199, 214, 

254, 255, 328. 
Mather, Increase, 29, 40, 41, 42, 43, 

189. 
Mather, Richard, 24, 29, 36, 42. 
Matthews, Brander, 366. 
Methodism, 67,68. 
Miller, "Joaquin," 419, 420. 
Milton, John, 18, 19, 20, 35, 50, 59, 

63, 426. 
Mitchell, Silas Weir, 369. 
Mitchill, Samuel Latham, 139. 
Monroe Doctrine, 122. 



Index 



441 



Moody, William V^aughan, 418. 

Moore, Thomas, 63, 159. 

Morris, George Pope, 182. 

Morris, Gouverneur, 99. 

Morton, Nathaniel, 35. 

Motley, John Lothrop, 223-225, 232, 

299, 3i^- 
Mowatt, Anna Cora, 172. 

Napoleon, 55, 114, 122, 301. 

Nation, 358, 363. 

Nelson, Lord, 54, 55, 56, 113. 

New England Magazine, 330. 

New England Primer, 2^. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 21, 29. 

New York Evening Post, 159, 162, 

164, 184, 356. 
New York Mirror, 182, 183. 
New York Sun, 252, 362. 
New York Times, 362. 
New York Tribune, 184, 246, 252, 

356,359,360,361,362,363. 
Nile, battle of the, 54, 55, 113, 114. 
Norris, Frank, 420. 
North American Review, i6o, 206, 

213, 218, 224, 241, 246, 298, 299, 

324, 358, 390- 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 213, 389. 

Odell, Jonathan, 97. 
Osborn, Laughton, 172. 
Osgood, Frances Sargent, 172, 174. 
Otis, James, 95, 96, 102, 202. 
Outlook, 358. 

Page, Thomas Nelson, 410. 
Paine, Thomas, 62. 
Palfrey, John Gorham, 223. 
Palmer, George Herbert, 388. 
Parker, Theodore, 247, 281, 282, 299 

321. 
Parkman, Francis, 225, 226, 232, 

299. 
Paulding, James Kirke, 137, 161. 
Peabody, Andrew Preston, 213. 
Peabody, Elizabeth, 248. 
"Pennsylvania Farmer," 96. 
Pepperell, Sir William, 66. 
Pepys, Samuel, 16, 29. 



Periodicals, 74. 

Phillips, Wendell, 282, 283, 299. 

Phillips, Willard, 160. 

Phips, Sir William, 29, 46, 66. 

Pierce, Franklin, 305, 341. 

Pierrepont, Sarah, 78, 79. 

Pinckney, Edward Coate, 403. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 135, 169-178, 179, 

183, 184, 185, 232, 312, 321, 346, 

347, 348, 349- 
Pope, Alexander, 28, 59. 
Prescott, William Hickling, 218, 22c 

222, 232, 299. 
Prince, Thomas, 214, 215. 
Princeton College, 72. 
Puck, 358. 
Putnam s Magazine, 358, 363. 

Quarterly Review, 159, 213. 
Quebec, battle of, 54, 55, 56. . 
Quincy, Josiah, 193. 

Radcliffe, Anne, 62, 131. 

Ralegh, Sir Walter, 2, 16, 19, 24, 29, 

35, io8- 

Rambler, 60. 

Raymond, Henry Jarvis, 362. 

Reform Bill, 114, 115, 118, 120, 429. 

Revolution of 1688, 26, 426. 

Rhodes, James Ford, 386. 

Right and Rights. See Ideals, Eng- 
lish. 

Riley, James Whitcomb, 418. 

Ripley, George, 247, 252, 360. 

"Rollo Books," 194. 

Ropes, John Codman, 386. 

Royce, Josiah, 388. 

Rumford, Count, 212. 

Raskin, John, 171 346,431. 

Salmagundi, 137. 

Sandys, George, 24, ;^2, 402. 

Sanfayana, George, 388. 

Sargent, Epes, 172. 

Saxe, John Godfrey, 181. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 62, 118, 119, 120, 

15°, 151 155, 157, 159, 183, 184, 
240, 430. 
Scribner's Magazine, 358. 



442 



Index 



Scribner's Monthly, 364. 
Seabury, Samuel, 96, 97. 
Sedgemoor, battle of, 53. 
Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 172. 
Sewall, Samuel, 28, 29, igi, 214, 277. 
Seward, William Henry, iSi. 
Shakspere, William, 2, 3, 18, ig, 24, 

35. SO. 59,63, 257,301,426. 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 118, 119, 142, 

159. 240,430- 
Shelley, Mrs., 159. 
Shepard, Thomas, 34, 47. 
Sibley, John Langdon, 44. 
Sill, Edward Rowland, 391. 
Simms, William Gilmore, 403, 404, 

405- 
Smith, Captain John, 33, 402. 
Smith Professorship, 216, 306, 307, 

315,316. 
Southern Literary Messenger, 170, 

180, 403. 
Southern Quarterly Revietv, 403. 
Southern Reinew, 403. 
Spain, 144-145. 

Spanish literature, 164, 217, 21S. 
Sparks, Jared, 213, 218, 219, 220, 

221, 235. 
Spectator, 61, 74, 86, 100, 103, 104. 
Spenser, Edmund, 2, 3, 24. 
Springfield Republican, 364. 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 310- 

311.335,336,337,361,362. 
Stamp Act, 68. 
Standish, Myles, 29. 
Stephens, Anne S., 172. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 120, 431. 
Stimson, Frederic Jesup, 393. 
Stockton, Frank Richard, 367. 
Stoddard, Solomon, 77. 
Stoughton, Governor William, 29. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 193, 284- 

287, 299. 
Stuart, Gilbert, 198. 
Sullivan, Thomas Russell, 393. 
Sumner, Charles, 283, 284, 299, 312. 

Tatler, 60, 74, 100. 

Taxation without representation, 93, 
94- 



Taylor, Bayard, 181, 360, 361. 

Taylor, Jeremy, 18, 20. 

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 120, 173, 

346,431- 
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 

120, 171,336,346,430. 
Thaxter, Celia, 391. 
Thoreau, Henry David, 247, 269- 

274, 277, 299,303. 
Ticknor, George, 215-218, 221, 222 

232, 299,306,316,326. 
Timrod, Henry, 403, 406, 407. 
Trafalgar, battle of, 55, 114. 
Transcendentalism, 239-253, 432. 
Trumbull, John, 104-106. 
Tuckerman, Henry Theodore, 181. 
Tudor, William, 213. 
Tyler, Moses Coit, 95. 

Unitarianism, 229-238, 432. 
University of Pennsylvania, 72, 85. 
University of Virginia, 170. 

Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 172. 

Very, Jones, 247. 

Victoria, Queen, 114, 115, 345, 346, 

429,430, 432. 
Virginia Colony, 23, 25. 

Wallace, Lew, 418, 

War of 1812, 122. 

Ward, Nathaniel, 37, 38. 

Ware, Henry, 233, 255. 

Warner, Charles Dudley, 364. 

Washington, George, 69, 102, 123. 

Waterloo, battle of, 55, 114, 118, 119. 

Webb, George, 73. 

Webster, Daniel, 203-205, 207, 241, 
295, 296, 299. 

Welde, Thomas, 36. 

"Westchester Farmer." See Sea- 
bury, Samuel. 

Wharton, Edith, 367. 

White, Richard Grant, 365. 

Whitefield, George, 67, 68, 88. 

Whitman, Walt, 371-378, 423. 

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 163, 193, 
289-297,299 303,313,321,432. 

Wigglesworth, Michael, 38, 39. 



Index 



443 



Wilkins, Mary Eleanor, 194, 392. 
William III, -|, 11, 21, 29. 50, 53, 54. 
William IV, 113, 114, 115. 
Williams Roger, 24, 2q, 46, 70. 
Williams College, 160. 
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 172, 173, 

181-184, 185, 232, 321. 
Winslow, Edward, 24, 35. 
Winsor, Justin, 385. 
Winthrop, Governor John, 24, 28, 29, 

34,35.46, 70. 214- 
Winthrop, Professor John, 212. 
Winthrop, Robert Charles, 208, 232. 



Wirt, William, 403. 
Wister, Owen, 369. 
Witchcraft, Salem, 29. 
Wolfe, General, 54, 66. 
Wood, William, 35. 
Woodberry, George Edward, 366. 
Woodworth, Samuel, 161. 
Woolman, John, 75. 
Wordsworth, William, 62, 63, 118, 
119, 142, 155, 167, 183, 430, 431. 

Yale College, 68, 72, loi, 102, 104, 
149. 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



017 197 310 7 



